Nigerian scammer dupes Australian woman of her $350,000 life savings

Jan Marshall thought she’d finally found love, but not only has she had her heart broken, her life savings of $350,000 have been ripped away.

DailyMail reported that the Melbourne woman is just another victim of the online dating scams which have cost Australians almost $30million in the past year alone.

Ms Marshall, 61, signed up to dating website Plenty of Fish in the hope of finding love after moving to Melbourne from Brisbane in 2012, and matched with one ‘Eamon Donegal Dubhlainn’.

According to his dating profile, Mr Dubhlainn was from Manchester, England, but working in the United States as a civil engineer.

Within a matter of months, she had accepted his marriage proposal, arranged to meet him and started sending money to his bank account.

Little did she know that Eamon Donegal Dubhlainn didn’t exist, and his profile was invented and managed by a group of fraudsters in Nigeria that specifically targeted Ms Marshall.

Ms Marshall works in change management for large corporations, she had the successful career and hoped to find love. Soon after leaving Brisbane for Melbourne in August 2012, she signed onto the dating site, Plenty Of Fish.

Putting those details on the internet was the start of her problems, as the information was quickly snapped up by the scammers, who deemed her the perfect target.

‘I hadn’t had a lot of relationships before and I quickly got approached by someone who claimed to be an engineer in America, and he said “I would be happy to go anywhere for the right person”, that’s apparently what they say,’ Ms Marshall told Daily Mail Australia.

‘We continued to communicate and very quickly he got me on email and phone and then instant messenger.’

But there was always a technical problem when they were supposed to video chat. The fraudsters provided her two photos, naming ‘the man’ as ‘Eamon Donegal Dubhlainn’.

‘He then said he was moving back to England and said “we will be together very shortly, you are a special person and I want to communicate just with you”.

‘Within a month it got very serious and he asked me to marry him, and I accepted, I was fully drawn into his love and attention.’

But for those closest to Jan, the alarm bells were ringing.

‘Several friends tried to warn me, when you were in these things they cut you off from your friends, encourage you to disassociate with them,’ she admitted.

‘They (the scammers) tell you that no one understands what we have, afterwards I had to go back to family and friends – your initial reaction is of shock shame and embarrassment.’

But the tactics were as effective as they were exhausting.

‘They talk to you morning, noon and night, they are professional and manipulative fraudsters, that’s the truth of the matter, just calling them “scammers” trivialises what they do,’ she added.

‘We are not stupid, we are manipulated, we are groomed just the same as child abuse victims are, in a sense we are caught in a honeymoon stage and then you are not really acting normally.’
Groomed, ahead of the inevitable requests for money.

‘He’d returned to England and then supposedly took a short-term contract in Dubai and promised he’d come onto Australia six to eight weeks after that,’ Ms Marshall said.

‘Once he said he was in Dubai, the money requests started, initially he said he had to pay some taxes he hadn’t allowed for.

‘It all happened over six weeks, and I only paid out to him expecting to get it back.

‘And then it was money for business materials, and it got worse, he supposedly got robbed on the way to pay those taxes,’ she added.

More excuses and elaborate stories began to build, as did Jan Marshall’s expenses.

‘It was always amounts like $40,000, which I gave to him twice, then he said he was in trouble with those he’d contracted work to and had to buy out the contract for $77,000,’ she said.

‘The larger amounts went to bank accounts, those of $40,000 and $30,000 went through Western Union, even thought there is a limit of $10,000 and I was doing it in multiples of 10.

‘Then, when he was apparently on his way to the airport (to come to Australia) he had a car crash and was in hospital, they had other people like nurses and doctors contact you, a document showing the expenses and others playing other roles,’ she said.

‘I didn’t realise it was a scam until he got on a plane to England, he said “I’m on my way now, thanks for everything”, it wasn’t until then that I realised.

‘He would always say “I am a wealthy man but I can’t access my funds”.

‘I would pay over $270,000 to them, that included savings, additional credit and ultimately I took money out of a self-managed super fund, which I wasn’t supposed to do and which now has me in strife with the the tax office.

‘I have a $76,000 tax bill on the super and that is at 46 per cent interest.

‘I am a professional person, in a well paid job, and my friends say that if they lined up 10 people in a line to see who would be caught out that I wouldn’t have been the last one to have been duped by a scam like this.’

Now Ms Marshall is fighting the Australian Taxation Office, which is pursuing her for $76,000 after she accessed her superannuation for the ‘man’.

Victoria Police investigated, passing on details to Western Union ‘so the names used could be stopped, as only they can do this’.

‘The only follow up I received is that the money was collected in Nigeria, though I had sent it to Dubai,’ Ms Marshall said.

Online dating fraud remains the number one scam for financial losses, with close to $30 million reported lost by Australians, despite it making up only three per cent of all scam reports.

Delia Rickard, deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), said: ‘Scammers are stealing not only your money but also your data, which they then use to commit identity theft or to sell to other scammers.

‘Personal data is a valued commodity and one that you cannot put too high a price on when it comes to protecting it.

‘Unfortunately, scammers also recognise the value of your personal information and will go to great lengths to steal it.

‘Increasingly, scammers are using personal information gleaned from social media profiles to target victims for a fraudulent relationship or investment.’

Nationally, the amount lost to dating and romance scammers jumped by 10 per cent in the past 12 months, cementing the category as the most lucrative for fraudsters.

‘Don’t think it’s just through dating websites, we found 33 per cent of these relationships started on Facebook and other social media,’ she said.

‘And men are victims as much as women, it’s basically 50-50.’

For Jan Marshall, the heartbreak and financial ruin caused by the scam won’t end any time soon.

‘It left me in a lot of strife, I gave him money from my pay, I had to borrow money to get through that first month, I closed down a lot of discretionary spending and I am still in strife in credit card and tax office debt,’ she warned.

‘I have been scared off (relationships), I have come to terms with it but haven’t wanted to go out there, quite honestly it has had a lasting affect.’ [DailyMail UK]