A retired care worker said her life was ‘torn to bits’ by a callous romance scammer who stole £22,000 of her savings after meeting on a dating site.
Julia Simpson, 68, (not her real name) had joined Match.com to make friends when she met a man using the alias ‘Daniel Peeters’ in May last year. Peeters claimed to be a 58-year-old widower from Cambridge, but unbeknown to Julia was using photographs stolen from a German journalist.
Over the next four months, the fraudster wooed Julia with romantic phone calls and expensive flowers, but was feeding her a web of lies. After being tricked into falling in love with the scammer, Julia sent him more than £22,000 between June and November when he concocted a variety of tales as to why he urgently needed to borrow money.
Fighting back tears, Julia said: “It left me absolutely torn to bits. I sometimes sit down and cry. He told me he loved me and we would get married, but it’s not just the emotions and it’s not the love bombing. We were in tune mentally in a lot of ways, and he betrayed my trust.”
The pair began talking regularly on the phone, when Peeters told Julia he was originally from Ghent, Belgium but now lived in England with his teenage son. The pair even arranged to meet in June, but Peeters pulled out at the last minute, claiming he had to go to New York to discuss a business deal and to buy some gold.
Julia said: “Things were beginning to be romantic, and he sent me some expensive flowers as an apology. He even mentioned the name of the hotel he was staying at, and I remember looking it up and it looked like a very expensive hotel.”
At first, the requests for money were small, including asking Julia to pay £50 for a pre-paid SIM card for his mobile phone, which he said could only be done in England. But as the scam became more elaborate, Peeters’ requests grew larger. He claimed his bank account had been frozen for buying too much gold and he was trapped overseas.
The fraudster even sent a faked bank account receipt which appeared to show he had £2 million. Julia subsequently wired thousands of pounds to bank accounts nominated by Peeters, who claimed the account holders would then meet him in New York and hand him the money. And just when she thought he had managed to book a flight home, the scammer called and claimed he had been in an accident.
“He was frantic, and told me he was phoning from the hospital,” she said. He told me he had hurt his foot, knee and chest in a road accident in a taxi on the way to the airport, and he needed money for cortisone injections. I could hear what sounded like a monitor machine beeping, and I believed him.”
Peeters said he needed more money to stay in a hotel near the hospital while he recuperated before flying home, and Julia continued to make payments. “He even sent me a photograph of his leg with an ice pack on the knee and, to be fair, it did look swollen,” she said.
Julia’s doubt set in, but when she accused Peeters of scamming her, he replied asking to marry her. I’m still taking it all in that it really was a scam, and I just can’t get my head around it,” she said. “I always thought I was switched on and canny. But now it’s finished, over. I’ve got to start thinking of myself.”
Julia’s finances were so dire she started looking at debt management plans. In a fortunate turn of events, solicitors from the National Fraud Helpline were able to recover all of Julia’s lost funds under a fraud reclaim scheme. Julia said: “I was shocked, pleased, and relieved to get the money back, mixed in with guilt. It means a lot, because it makes me feel less stupid. My judgement was wrong. I will never do this again.”
The solicitors which work as a branch of Richardson Hartley Law were able to ensure Co-op Bank returned the £22,000 to her account. But the firm is warning that scammers are increasingly targeting older women on dating sites such as Match.com and Tinder.
In the last five years alone, the financial impact of dating scams in the UK has exceeded £400 million, according to figures from Action Fraud. Between January 2020 and December 2024, nearly 40,000 crime reports were classified as ‘dating fraud’, with victims suffering an estimated total loss of £409.7m.
But the organisation says the true cost is likely to be even higher, as many cases go unreported. Authorities say scammers prey on vulnerable targets online, using dating sites and social media to reel their victims in. Last year heartless fraudster Cieran McNamara, of Coventry, was jailed for seven years for swindling over £300,000 from four different women across the country.
Maxwell Rusey, was also thrown behind bars for five years after conning his victim in Medway, Kent out of £120,000. Action Fraud, the UK’s national fraud reporting centre is run by City of London police and runs regular campaigns to help inform victims on how to protect themselves.
Leo McGowan, a lawyer at National Fraud Helpline solicitors, said: “Dating sites have become a key target for scammers. They prey on the fact that people are lonely and seem to be targeting older women, in particular.
“They will often claim to be someone a few years younger than the victim and make up their own sob story. To make themselves seem real they will send handwritten love letters and cards through the post, as well as gifts ranging from flowers to ornaments and jewellery. Romance scammers tend to be very patient and will take months to lure their victims in before taking their money. They will keep going until their victim is left penniless.”
