A love-struck girl handed over a whole lot of hundreds of kilos to a conman posing as Hollywood actor Jason Statham. The sufferer says she was conned out of the fortune after being bombarded with flirty messages from a scammer pretending to be the star, who is understood for movies resembling The Quick And The Livid and the Transporter franchises.
The lady was shopping a Fb web page devoted to Statham, who’s engaged to mannequin Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, when she was first contacted. She believed it was the 51-year-old actor “being pleasant”.
She added: “I believed, ‘Oh, that’s good of him, speaking to his followers’. I may need been star-struck then, I don’t know.” The fraudster inspired her to maneuver the dialog to the encrypted WhatsApp service the place he despatched her a succession of flirty messages and advised her he cherished her.
She began handy over the money after he claimed fee that he was owed from a movie had been delayed. In one of many messages he mentioned: “Will you’re keen on me and be the particular girl beside me for the remainder of your life honey?”
In one other he wrote: “Simply ship £20k this evening and tomorrow you do the identical then by Friday it’s already accomplished.” The lady, who requested to not be named, advised BBC Radio Manchester that she was susceptible on the time following the deaths of each her mom and her fiancé.
She added: “I’m fairly a robust particular person however clearly sure issues get to you and also you let your guard down. I don’t really feel like I used to be in the appropriate place myself due to what I’d been by.”
The lady began transferring funds to the fraudster totalling a whole lot of hundreds of kilos. She mentioned: “It was a considerable quantity, which might have made a distinction to my life and my household.” The sufferer, from the North West, ultimately contacted Better Manchester police.
Detective Constable Craig Moylon described fraud as an “epidemic”, and added: “This woman has been topic to any individual who simply tricked her at a really susceptible time in her life.
“Once you see the relentless messaging that this woman obtained from this particular person, and also you see the grooming and the exploitation … the affect is extraordinary.”
The lady mentioned the scammer had “no emotions in any respect” and the ordeal has left her much less trusting of individuals. The conman is believed to have been working from overseas and police have thus far been unable to trace him down.
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