A woman has told how she was conned out of £20k by a "callous" romance fraudster - who convinced her he was sick and needed the money for private medical care.
Suzanne Famula met Christopher Harris, 41, a car salesman, on an online dating site in November 2020.
Suzanne Famula met Christopher Harris, 41, a car salesman, on an online dating site in November 2020.
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00:00 I just thought I was helping someone in need and trying to be a nice person to
00:07 help someone out who I thought was really poorly and wasn't as poorly as
00:13 they said they were. I even showed like my friends his profile and there was it
00:17 was all very normal. He said he had a normal job, operations manager at a
00:20 dealership. To me that's a normal run-of-the-mill job. He didn't have that
00:25 job. We first met in the December off and on for a few months and then got
00:29 a bit more serious in the May. He just asked me money for like mortgage,
00:33 council tax, bills, hospital stays, like going private and then I realised after
00:42 a couple of months that it was all a lie. It's also getting the banks to realise
00:47 that just because you meet them in person doesn't mean it's just theft. It
00:52 is fraud because they're lying about what they need the money for like he did
00:58 to me. They didn't take that into account at all and I had to take them to the
01:02 financial ombudsman which was 18 months of back and forth, back and forth. It's a
01:08 hard process and it's a long process but it is worth doing. It gets your money
01:12 back. If it makes the authorities and more people aware that of the effect
01:18 that it has on you as a person and what it does to you it also might make them
01:23 act a bit quicker.