Lonely heart scams: Woman gives £80,000 to handsome ‘soldier’

Divorced mother-of-three Kate Roberts imagined she had found the man of her dreams when she was approached on the Friends Reunited website by a handsome US soldier.

Unfortunately, the 47-year-old was falling into the arms of an internet scammer, who tricked her into sending a fortune she couldn’t afford to lose in his direction.

Miss Roberts, from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, has shared her story with the media after she was conned out of £80,000. And the lonely divorcee could hardly afford to send a man she’d never met such a huge amount of money – she had to take out loans, credit cards and borrow from her family and friends to send the fake soldier money.

According to reports, the scam has left Miss Roberts in financial ruin, and forced her to sell her house to pay off the debts.

The whole sorry story is told in greater detail in the…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.