2025-04-01
32 分钟They managed to extract about £20,000 from me.
I was massively in love with this person.
We were going to sell around the world, buy a yacht,
sell around the world, live happily ever after, but of course it never happened.
It was all absolutely fictitious and the amount of trouble they took to convince me
that they were real is just unbelievable and so skillful.
Nikki McLeod turned to an online chat room in search of company to ease her loneliness.
And that was where Nikki met oil rig worker Alan Morgan.
The pair spoke for months and formed a relationship.
This is Nikki McLeod, a retired professor of neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Nikki made both UK and international headlines earlier this year after revealing the harrowing discovery
that a promising three-month relationship she had invested in emotionally and financially was in fact in elaborate online romance scam.
We think it couldn't happen to us.
We think we can spot the false profiles on Facebook and other social media platforms.
But figures from Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, suggest otherwise.
These show that between January 2020 and December 2024,
nearly 40,000 cases of dating fraud were reported, with total losses exceeding £400 million.
And in the UK, more than half of online fraud cases reported relate to impersonation fraud,
according to Ofcom, the UK independent communications regulator.
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