He Said He Loved Me
A true story and cautionary tale.
I always thought I would never be caught out, but I was wrong.
I work for a financial institution. Every year I complete courses on money laundering and cybercrime. I have always been the level-headed one, the person friends call when they want a sensible opinion. A scammer catching me was simply not something I believed could happen.
It began with a television series I enjoy, The Rookie. I liked the pictures and posts on Facebook, the way any fan does. Then I received a friend request from the actor who played my favourite character. He wanted to talk privately, and he sent me an email address so we could chat on Teams.
I thought I was the luckiest fan alive. Out of all the people who follow the show, he had chosen me to give him direct feedback on the series. After a while we were speaking twice a day, every day. The conversations grew deeper, and slowly he started confiding in me. He told me he was having problems with his management team. As a young actor he had signed a contract that gave them the rights to his fame and fortune.
Then he asked for help. He was negotiating a deal with the Hallmark Channel for a new movie and needed an investor. He emailed me a sponsor agreement and a Memorandum of Understanding that set out what my money would buy: a share in the cost of production and in the profits once filming began. Every page looked legitimate.
I had saved US dollars in an offshore account over many years, so I offered to contribute. I paid more than $20 000 into the Hallmark Channel account, or so I believed. That was the first part of the scam.
We kept talking, and eventually he told me he loved me. I fell for it completely. I did some research on him and social media listed him as “happily married with two children”. When I confronted him with this, he told me they were separated, but that they shared a management team who insisted they still look like a power couple. I did not want to be the ‘other woman’. I did not want to be a home wrecker, but his answer was convincing enough for me to say yes.
Two months later, the next problem arose. He owed £40 644 on his London properties, a fine for unpaid taxes, he said. He sent documents to me listing the property names, addresses and values. He needed money for an attorney to fly to London and fight the case, because he was too busy filming the new season of The Rookie. He asked me to pay the fine in dollars, not pounds, even though the tax document stated pounds.
I did not question it. He kept telling me how much he loved me and how soon we would be together. Maybe I was looking for someone to love me at that point in my life, and it felt wonderful to have the attention of this famous person. So, I paid another $26 000 into various accounts.
That should have set off every alarm in my head, but it didn’t. I was thinking with my heart, not my head.
Then came the last request. He sent me a letter from the UK tax office about the fine, saying the rest could be paid back in instalments, and he asked me to help him pay it. To do that, I applied to my bank to re-bond my townhouse.
Something made me phone a friend who is a tax lawyer. He looked at everything and told me plainly that it was a scam. I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach, like the bottom had dropped out of my world. Was this really happening to me?
Shell-shocked, I cancelled the bond application.
I told the scammer the bank had declined the request because someone would need to sign surety. I said that to find a person willing to sign, I would have to tell them the whole story of our relationship and the money I had already paid. He said that was not a good idea, and that he would make another plan.
That was when I knew I had been played. I felt humiliated.
At the beginning of 2024, I was a woman five years from retirement. I had no debt, no bond on my home and $20 000 saved in an offshore account.
By January 2025, I was four years from retirement with more than R500 000 in debt. The bank closed my offshore account, telling me I had not used it in line with its terms and conditions.
If my friend had not warned me that it was a scam, I would have been R1.5 million in debt and my townhouse would have been bonded again.
To add insult to injury, I made one more mistake, and I want you to know about it too.
I went onto Facebook to report that someone was impersonating the actor. A second impersonator picked up my message. He said he would help me bring the first one to justice and involve the FBI. He told me I needed to join his fan club and everything would be resolved.
It turns out that this was another scam, and I fell for that too.
If anyone invites you to join a fan club, treat it as an immediate red flag.
There are countless impersonators on Facebook using the names of well-known characters, their names spelled just a little differently. Every one of them is a scam. The people behind them are trained to watch what you like and follow, and they can hook you within seconds if you let them. Think carefully about what you like, follow and accept on social media.
I fear that I will never get my money back, even though I have reported the case to the police. The wheels of justice grind slowly.
But the money is not what I think about most. I think about those messages twice a day and how I felt. That feeling was real to me, even though everything behind it was invented. Losing it hurt in a way that losing money never could.
What keeps me going is the hope that this manipulative scammer will be found, arrested and made to pay for his crimes. I am certain I am not his only victim.
I am not telling you this story so that you feel sorry for me and certainly not so that you can mock me and tell me how naïve I was.
I am telling you because I know I am not the only one who has fallen for this scam and others like it. Somewhere tonight, another person is smiling at a message from someone who says they are loved, but in reality, they are being played.
I tell this cautionary tale because it may be you, or someone you love.