CUFFING season – where single people seek short-term partners during the colder months – is in full swing.
But with more women than ever before looking for love online, many are being swindled out of thousands of pounds.
Figures from Victim Support show a 13 per cent rise in romance fraud over the past year.
Around 250,000 women have been scammed, according to NatWest, with fraudsters posing as love interests.
Here, Yasmin Harisha speaks to two women who found themselves out of pocket while looking for their perfect match.
‘He said he’d been kidnapped’, Rachel, 54
BUSINESS development manager Rachel Elwell, 54, tried to find love after the breakdown of her marriage and ended up losing her life savings.
She says: “IT was New Year’s Eve 2020 and I’d divorced and felt very lonely.
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I joined Facebook Dating. The next day a man named Stephen Bario, 54, messaged me.
I checked his profile picture and he looked dark and handsome.
He told me he was Spanish but lived in Coventry – 25 miles from where I lived.
Then, 12 days after we’d started talking, he said he was managing an engineering project and had to go to Ukraine for work.
A few days later, Stephen…
