Conmen have swindled Londoners out of at least £4 million in “romance fraud” in the past year alone, Scotland Yard warned as it issued an alert over the practice.
More than 100 victims in the capital have been targeted in the past 12 months, with detectives warning cases are on the rise.
One businesswoman, in her forties from Hillingdon, wad conned out of £1.6 million by a man she met on a dating website. She gave increasingly large sums of money to the man and his ‘associates’ over 20 months last year.
Two men were due to be sentenced in connection with the case. Nigerian Ife Ojo,31, who claimed to be studying at the London School of Business and Finance, and Olusegun Agbaje, 43, an NHS administrative assistant of Hornchurch, Essex, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud at an earlier hearing.
Detectives believe they were part of a wide gang targeting women online. Many members are based overseas.
When the pair were arrested police found a laptop containing records of conversations between the woman and the man, who called himself” Christian Anderson”, and a copy of The Game, a book on the art of seduction.
The woman told the police she met Anderson, who said he was an oil industry engineer, on a dating website last February. Usually, she met him in person after a couple of weeks.
As the relationship continued he convinced the woman he loved her but said he needed a loan of £30,000 for equipment for an engineering project in Benin. The woman paid the cash and handed over further sums in a series of increasingly elaborate requests.
She told detectives she often doubted the man’s authenticity but every time she asked for proof he sent convincing but false documentation.
Detective Chief Inspector Gary Miles, of the Met’s Falcon cyber-crime and fraud task force, said:” These victims were ruthlessly manipulated by men and women pretending to love them.
“The suspects showered them with compliments and confided in their seemingly innermost secrets to them. In many cases suspects were talking to victims online or over the phone for hours every day”.
