Already a subscriber?When Detective Constable Rebecca Mason first visited the Hertfordshire flat of Alan Baldwin in November 2020, months after lockdowns had begun and each of our worlds had shrunk, it was to break the news that the person he was in love with did not exist.
The sums were huge. Turner had sent £240,000 in all, though this in itself was not unusual. As Mason looked further into the case, following the money through numerous accounts, she found they led not just to one person, but to a multinational network in which everyone profited from the same fake persona: “Kevin Churchill”. Mason tracked more than 40 victims; the money totalled millions.
On that first visit, Baldwin calmly told the officers that the payments had been sent to a friend, Fred Williams. They had matched on the dating site Gaydar, and Williams’s requests for money had started out small – £20 or £30 for a few drinks – before escalating. He was a Nigerian national, Baldwin explained, who lived in America. The sole heir to his father’s estate, which included several UK properties, Williams needed financial assistance to claim his inheritance.
For Elisabeth Carter, a criminologist and forensic linguist at Kingston University, the bill was a missed opportunity. “There’s a massive gap, and it’s a disappointment that it wasn’t specifically covered,” she said. Carter said victims of romance fraud – who often stay in touch with their fraudsters long after the police have informed them of their crime – have much in common with victims of domestic violence and coercive control.
Even when the fraudsters operate in person, they are not easy to catch. If your modus operandi is getting engaged to older women then persuading them to sell their houses , you might expect that a knock on the door would never be far away. Indeed, in 2020 67-year-old Robinson was sentenced to 10 years, after being arrested while working on what seemed to be his second victim. But it turned out he had at least 30 other aliases and a conning career that dated back to 2013.
Yet even she is not immune from fraud. Just recently someone set up a fake Tinder profile using Mason’s photographs. She got it shut down immediately, but worries that the damage was done: “It wouldn’t surprise me if, in three years’ time, a report comes through of me conning people out of a ton of money.”Sharon Turner’s case had landed on Mason’s desk in September 2016, on her second day in Surrey Police’s Economic Crime Unit.
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