#ART OF CHARM SCAM SERIES#

I’m scared and I don’t want that to happen to me, so I’m going to be angry with you.”īut it’s not entertainment when you’re the one at the centre of the story.

“People get quite annoyed when somebody’s scammed because it reminds us that, Shit, that could have been me. “A lot of people watch these stories to feel superior,” says life and relationship coach Megan Luscombe. When we devour these tales we develop a taste for more perverse entertainment rather than an understanding of what it’s like to experience something so utterly shattering.

#ART OF CHARM SCAM SERIES#

Likewise, the tales of romance cons that happen in person are turned into podcasts and TV series that are so slickly produced that it’s easy to forget that real people were hurt. Their stories are quickly turned into clickbait headlines and their vulnerabilities exploited for the enjoyment of internet trolls. We’re all too familiar with stories of love gone wrong online, where women (and some men, but mostly women) suffer emotional and financial devastation once their digital Prince(ss) Charming disappears. “I felt worse than when my husband had died.” “When he told me the past two years had all been a scam, my heart fell out of my chest,” she says. Yet her diligent checking and reliable resources still weren’t enough to see through Dr Eric Cole, a travelling British widower who was actually a young scammer in Nigeria. Montgomery Johnson, a widowed mother of four, had been a paralegal, a US Air Force intelligence officer and a senior bank manager.

She gave more than $1.7 million to a man she had been in a two-year online relationship with. After 72 days of contact, she never heard from him again.Ī similar thing happened to Florida woman Debby Montgomery Johnson. He would pay her back, he said, he was just having trouble on a job site in Dubai and needed a little bit to tide him over his taxes were due, but he couldn’t access his account he was robbed on his way to pay those taxes so needed to borrow the same amount again. Or “lend” it, rather, since he was a British engineer with millions of pounds in his bank account and the (forged) statements to prove it. It took less than three months for Jan Marshall’s online lover to convince her to give him $260,000. Alexandra English reveals the silent epidemic of the love con, and how youth, wits and intelligence are no guarantee we won’t succumb The romance scammer is a bogeyman for our digital age, but victims are often dismissed for being ‘gullible’.

Art of charm scam