- Have YOU been a victim of romance fraud? Email freya.barnes@mailonline.co.uk
A single mother-of-three has lost her £6,000 life savings after a crypto ‘Tinder Swindler’ she met on the dating app tricked her into handing it over.
Natalie Foster, 42, matched with a man who went by ‘James’ on Tinder three weeks ago.
The pair hit if off immediately before James began talking incessantly about cryptocurrency.
He persuaded Natalie to get a crypto wallet – a virtual wallet which allows you to buy and keep cryptocurrency.
She was convinced to upload money and ‘trade’ crypto – with the scammer initially making it look like she had made profits of up to £67,000.
But this sum quickly dropped to zero before she was able to withdraw any of it as real cash and she found herself down by £6,000.
Natalie, from Windsford, Cheshire, said: ‘I feel stupid, I feel ridiculous – I can’t believe I’m one of these women I read about in magazines.’
Natalie, who is signed off work due to her multiple sclerosis (MS), said James was very forward with her from the moment they matched on Tinder.
She added: ‘He looked like a really good-looking guy, he had nice dogs, and was being very forward – I wasn’t that into that.’
A week into their chats, James brought up that he had an uncle who had made a fortune in the crypto world.
Natalie said: ‘I’m not a gambler but he was very convincing.
‘He told me to put in £300 and then transfer it to a trading platform. I did it and then made £80 profit.’
Natalie then invested another £100 on the trading platform and made another £93 – though she would never receive the money.
A few days later, James said the following evening would be ‘a very big night’.
She said: ‘He convinced me to put in even more money, so I put £2,000 down.
‘He then said he had been in touch with his uncle who had told him there was a once-in-a-century deal about to go down and I could make 800 per cent profit.’
Natalie then withdrew all the money she had left from her savings and transferred it to the crypto trading account – totaling £3,500.
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She was then added to a WhatsApp group with a man purporting to be her Tinder match’s uncle and another person.
According to Natalie, they then did a trade which bagged $86,000 (£67,000) profit on her trading platform account.
When she went to look at it herself it briefly said she had exceeded the amount she could hold in it before her total funds suddenly changed to zero.
Natalie said: ‘I then contacted customer services who said I owed them 20 per cent tax to a New York bank account totalling £20,000.’
But then James transferred $5,000 (£4,000) into her trading platform account.
Natalie said: ‘At this point I thought it was still legit but I then talked to my ex-partner and he gave me a reality check.
‘I realised I had literally fallen for a textbook crypto scam.’
None of the profits from the trades ever went back to her apart from the initial £80, with Natalie losing £6,000 in total.
She went back to James to confront him about the scam – only for him to tell her she should ‘go and die quickly’.
He then unmatched her and vanished without trace.
Natalie says looking back there were ‘all these red flags’ including James saying he was German, but not having a German accent, and even getting the names of his own pet dogs mixed up.
And she said his pictures were ‘clearly just downloaded from somewhere online’.
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She has since reported what happened to her to Action Fraud and has instructed a solicitor who is hopeful Natalie will be able to get her money back.
Natalie said: ‘It was my whole life savings which I inherited off my grandad – it’s left me totally distraught.
‘I just feel stupid and ridiculous.
‘It’s so awful – I don’t know how they can do this to to other people’.
MailOnline has approached Tinder and Action Fraud for comment.
Natalie’s case comes after the unlucky victim and star of the Netflix Tinder Swindler documentary blasted British police earlier this month after figures revealed less than one per cent of romance scammers are ever charged
Figures uncovered by the Daily Mail show only 53 charges were brought following 23,685 reports of romance fraud over a three-year period.
Cecilie Fjellhøy, 34, who has lived in London for seven years, said the tiny prosecution rates showed the UK remained a ‘free for all’ for fraudsters.
Ms Fjellhøy was scammed by the now-infamous fraudster Simon Leviev who posed as a wealthy heir to dupe his lovers out of small fortunes.
The Norwegian told how, despite being conned out of £200,000, she was ‘treated as a suspect not a victim’ by the Met Police while they investigated her case.
Detectives eventually let her off after two years – but also dropped all charges against Mr Leviev.
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Ms Fjellhøy last night revealed she has since made an official complaint to the Met Police over their handling of her case, which is still ongoing.
She said: ‘What does that say about police when they can’t even get the most famous romance scammer in the world?
‘What sort of message are they sending the rest of the fraudster community? That it’s a free-for-all. They could have sent a message but they didn’t, they let him go free.’
The latest statistics, uncovered in a Freedom of Information request, reveal nearly 8,000 romance frauds are reported to Action Fraud every year – yet just a fraction are ever charged.
Experts said police often struggled to go after romance scammers because the majority were from abroad, particularly West Africa, which was outside their jurisdiction.
Over £92million was lost to romance fraudsters across Britain last year leaving thousands of hopeful and trusting single people distressed.
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