The victim of a cruel £113,000 romance scam is now working to try and protect others from the same fate.
Rachel Elwell has bravely come forward to tell her story as an estimated 40% of romance scams occur during the summer according to research by digital security company ESET.
Rachel, from Walsall, was persuaded by her sister to join Facebook's dating site at New Year in 2020 to be able to chat with people during the Covid lockdowns.
Very soon into January, she began chatting with a man who she believed was a father of one originally from Spain.
She told the Mirror: "He appeared to be gentleman-ly! He was in his fifties so not very social-media savvy and he lived not too far away in Coventry, I wouldn't have spoken to anybody that was much further away anyway."
Whilst chatting on the site, the man shared that he was a widow of seven years and that his wife had died of breast cancer.
He also claimed he was a single dad to a teenage daughter who was going to university soon and had lost his parents whilst he was very young.
The man told Rachel he was an engineer who frequently dealt with contracts abroad - in this case it was in Ukraine.
Rachel said: "I'm naturally quite a sensitive, empathetic person and his story completely took advantage of my empathy and looking back I can see how I was being manipulated.
"When he started to ask me for money, I already felt sympathy for him and they really played on that."
Not so long after they started chatting the conversation moved away from Facebook and over to email where the two shared pictures of their day-to-day lives, families and pets and eventually it moved onto Whatsapp and phone calls.
The man first asked Rachel for money in January - so only a few weeks after they began talking.
She said: "He told me that contracting tax laws had changed in Ukraine and he was in a dilemma with a tax bill but that he had investors which he would rely on to cover it so at first I didn't think anything of it and I thought that's your problem so I left him to it.
"A few days later he told me that the second phase of funding from his investors couldn't be released but he had some surplus to pay some of the tax and that's when he asked me for some money.
"The first payment he wanted was around £250 and it was because he had to use the surplus for the tax but he needed a bit extra to cover wages and when he asked I was absolutely horrified, disgusted and angry, and I even asked him 'are you trying to scam me?'"
Rachel described him as being "very emotional" and "cried and sobbed" on the phone to her, he also promised Rachel that he wasn't trying to scam her.
However, she had doubts about sending any money and went to her sister and mum for advice on what she should do.
She added: "I suppose my mom and sister saw me as being so well adjusted and put together after my marriage breakdown, you know? I was doing really well I had a great job, my own house, a dog, good friends and family.
"I am also a business person, a professional so they always trusted me and believed that I always knew what I was doing."
Rachel decided to make the payment as all she wanted to do was help, and if she lost the £250 it wouldn't be the "end of the world" although she did have sleepless nights when she thought too much about it.
Not too long after, she was asked for even more money, an extra £500 and then an extra £1,000, and the sums continued to get bigger.
She was convinced to make these massive payments as he had shown her documents which appeared to prove the money was for legitimate things.
She added: "This is how he got me, I started making the payments because I felt like I needed to protect the payment that I had made before.
"In my case, if he didn't pay the tax bill, he couldn't complete phase one works, which meant he wouldn't receive the investment funds for phase two, which meant he couldn't pay off creditors that had already put money into the project, so by making the payments I believed that I was protecting my previous ones.
"I truly believed that I needed to help him to get this work so he can come back to the UK, and to protect my money, it's just crazy, I was truly trapped."
Over time, the story Rachel was told became a lot darker as the scammer tried to frighten her into continuing to send cash and eventually, she turned to credit cards and loans to keep up with the payments.
She said: "He told me his daughter was going to become homeless, that he was going to lose everything he had.
"He then told me that he had been kidnapped because he owed a loan shark money and he sent me photographs of him locked in a cellar, I told him to try and get to the police or the embassy but he said the police were in the loan shark's pocket and he would be killed if he doesn't pay."
"At the time, I kept thinking 'life is worth more than money' and the responsibility I felt, I can't even put it into words".
At the same time, Rachel had been speaking to the scammer's supposed daughter and housekeeper which made the story more believable.
Rachel discovered the truth a few months later in April when she went to visit the scammer's "home" in Coventry - where she came across the property's actual owner.
She said: "I had to just get away, I didn't know what that situation was and I felt unsafe so I got in my car and drove away.
"I cried to my mum on the phone and I just thought, oh my god my entire life is over, everything I'd worked for since I was 15 was lost, I am bankrupt."
Rachel described this moment as being the "start of her fight" in trying to get the money she had lost back.
She reported the crime to the police, and she contacted both her banks and all her creditors to tell them what had happened to her.
After supplying all her evidence to them, the calls, the documents, the police reports, as well as health records for mental health treatment she has received, she managed to have some of her debts written off.
However, getting the money back from her bank has been the hardest battle she has continued to face over the last two years.
She said: "Ultimately, I believe the banks did not adhere to the laws which are there to protect victims of fraud.
"My case is still with the Financial Ombudsman and has been there for two years, a couple of times I had a call from my bank when I was transferring some money and was asked 'are you happy for us to release this money' but that was as far as the conversation went.
"They didn't go into why I was moving the money or asked me to provide any details.
"Now, since Covid, I think there are better protections now but it still needs to be better, there is a long way to go.
"When banks adhere to their own protocols and laws that's great, but if they don't that's when people can lose money."
Rachel now works as a spokesperson for the Economic Crime Victim Care Unit where she works to help and empower others to come forward to help raise awareness of romance scams.
Last year she was invited to be a guest speaker at a House of Lords Select Committee to discuss the "banking sectors failure for victims of fraud".
She said: "We also need to stop victim blaming in these cases, we're losing billions to fraud every year so we cannot just blame it on the people who have fallen for them.
"Billions is being lost to scams like this every year, and its only going to get worse if banks do not step up."
