How I was was conned out of £62k by a Facebook scammer posing as a French single mother

It was a cold January afternoon in 2019 when Arthur Jackson finally left his wife. After 25 years of marriage he’d had enough of the arguments.

‘I’d just got home and she started shouting,’ recalls Arthur, 63. ‘My Collie, Patch, doesn’t like confrontation, so we sat at the bottom of the garden. He looked at me as if to say, “Let’s go”. So we did.’

His decision came after years of heartbreak. In 2017, he lost his daughter to suicide, in 2018 his mother died and he had been forced to retire as a miner after a workplace accident.

He packed up some belongings and moved in to his sister’s empty bungalow in Reading, ready to start life afresh.

He began browsing Facebook when a notification popped up. Juliana Pavet, supposedly from Paris, had sent a friend request.

‘She looked like a model,’ Arthur recalls of the profile pictures showing a glamorous woman in her mid-30s on yachts in France and exotic locations across Europe and Morocco.

‘I absolutely love France,’ Arthur admits. ‘I used to go over there two or three times a year. I accepted the request.’

‘Juliana’ messaged him immediately. ‘When I asked why she was messaging an old man like me, she said French men didn’t know how to treat a woman.’

The ‘relationship’ quickly consumed Arthur’s life. ‘She’d send a message first thing – “Good morning, did you sleep well?” Then I’d get little updates – “Just dropping my daughter Naomi at school”. Then, “How’s Patch today?” Sometimes we’d chat till 2 or 3 in the morning.’

Juliana said she lived in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, with her daughter and grandmother, after being abandoned by a violent ex.

Within four weeks, their messages grew romantic. ‘She’d end them with “Millions of kisses, sleep well”,’ Arthur recalls. ‘She told me she loved me. Said I was better than any French man. And I won’t lie, I said it back... old fool that I am.’

Following his divorce, Arthur had received £30,000 from the sale of the marital home and had another £10,000 in savings. ‘I shared my dream with Juliana to buy a motorhome and travel around Europe.

'She said she had also dreamt of doing exactly the same thing,’ he says. Together, they crafted an enticing future vision, eventually settling in Corsica as a family.

‘She kept saying she couldn’t wait until we got together,’ Arthur adds. ‘She’d talk about “me, you, Naomi and Patch walking down the beach”. I saw it all so clearly – pulling up the van by the beach to sleep for the evening. It would have been the perfect family I never had.’

However, six weeks into the relationship, Juliana told Arthur she couldn’t afford the electricity bill and could he help. He sent 200 euros via Western Union. ‘She was over the moon. So grateful.’

And so began a pattern of Arthur being asked to help with expenses. ‘She said she had no bank account, which seemed strange but I didn’t question it.’

Every couple of weeks came a new request for a hundred here, a couple of hundred there. Then in late August, Arthur transferred £800 from his Halifax account. Ten days later it was £1,200 for ‘urgent bills’.

‘I’d get desperate messages,’ says Arthur. ‘She’d say Naomi needed winter clothes or her grandmother’s medication wasn’t covered by insurance. I couldn’t let them suffer.

'I convinced myself I was literally helping somebody to get a better life. There were moments when I’d think, “this seems off”. Like when the amounts kept getting bigger, or when she’d have a new problem right after I solved the last one.

‘Then she’d send a photo of Naomi in her school uniform or tell me how much she missed me and my doubts would melt away.’

The Western Union process became routine. ‘For something like a 200 euro utility bill, I’d go to the Western Union office in a shop, tell them I wanted to send money, give them my bank card and it would go to the Western Union main office,’ Arthur explains.

‘I’d get a receipt with a transaction number, take a picture of it and send it to her via messenger. She’d take that picture to a Western Union office in France to collect the money.’

He estimates he made at least five payments through Western Union totalling around £2,000 for what she claimed were shopping, bills and normal living expenses.

As the relationship deepened, the amounts increased. In November 2019, Arthur transferred £5,000 from his Halifax account. ‘She said she needed it for a deposit on a safer place to live after harassment from her ex,’ says Arthur.

The scam took a dramatic turn in late 2019 when Juliana informed Arthur she had been left a big inheritance by her late father including property in Morocco and included photographs of a magnificent villa.

‘It was out of this world – a massive three-storey modern villa with a pool. I told her we could move in there, that it would be perfect for us,’ he recalls. ‘But she said the Moroccan government was forcing her to sell it because of unpaid taxes from her father’s estate.’

Juliana claimed the property was worth €758,000 but to access it, she needed help paying the taxes. These claims were supported by what appeared to be official documents. ‘She sent over photocopies from the Moroccan government and French government, land registry documents and tax papers,’ Arthur explains. ‘They all looked official.’

On December 2, 2019, Arthur made two payments totalling £13,000 from his HSBC account to an alleged notary in Morocco handling the estate.

Between April 1 and April 15, 2020, Arthur sent another £9,000 to Juliana’s supposed grandmother handling aspects of the inheritance.

By summer 2020, he transferred more than £4,400 to a friend of Juliana who had a working bank account. ‘She said if she paid all these fees, she’d get access to the money and could send me 70,000 euros,’ Arthur recalls.

As his savings dwindled, Arthur was forced to sell his most treasured possession – a Second World War Jeep. ‘When Juliana claimed she needed money to travel to Switzerland to open an offshore account for her inheritance, I sold it for £18,000,’ he says. ‘I was gutted. That vehicle was my pride and joy. I’d spent years restoring every part of it.’

Arthur had repeatedly tried to meet Juliana. When her grandmother supposedly died in October 2020, he offered help. ‘I said I’d come and help with the funeral. But she always had excuses.’

Finally, Arthur put his foot down. ‘I said I’m not going to help you any more unless you prove to me that you exist,’ he recalls.

‘She finally agreed to a video call and the picture came through briefly – I could see a woman with jet-black long hair, which didn’t match her photo and the lighting was dark and shadowy, and the call cut off after less than a minute. It was confusing.

'I knew it wasn’t her and part of me knew this wasn’t right but the other part so wanted to believe her.’

The scammers picked up on Arthur’s doubts – as Juliana sent him a bank card from the United Bank for Africa (UBA), claiming it contained 380,000 euros.

‘I went to my nearest cash point, put the card in and there was about eight euros.’ When he contacted Juliana, she said he needed to pay another 4,500 euros to ‘open the account’.

‘I contacted UBA bank and it confirmed the account was non-existent and a scam.’

When Arthur confronted Juliana she was furious. ‘“Are you calling me a liar? You’re challenging my integrity!” she said. She went offline then came back apologetic after a few days. “I’m sorry, you’re right to be suspicious. It’s the banks, the Moroccan government, the notary.” It was always someone else’s fault. But by then, I knew deep down it was all lies.’

Arthur was devastated. The photographs he’d been sent of Juliana were just images of an unwitting individual found online and exploited for the purpose of fraud. ‘I felt literally sick to my stomach. I had to convince myself that I had helped her – that was the only way I could get over it.’

‘It wasn’t so much the losing the money that hurt. It was the betrayal and realising that all the promises, all the dreams we supposedly shared were gone.’

Today, Arthur believes the banks did little to intervene. He says Halifax never queried payments of up to £8,000. ‘At HSBC, I transferred £13,000 in a single day to a stranger in Morocco.’

Arthur’s Halifax statement showed 17 transfers between August 2019 and February 2020, totalling £27,750.

His HSBC statement revealed another £26,407 sent to the scammers between December 2019 and July 2020. In total, Arthur sent money to four or five different bank accounts belonging to various individuals.

The Halifax payments alone, which were supposedly related to Juliana’s inheritance, totalled £30,850 including bank charges.

Between the bank transfers, Western Union payments and phone cards, his total losses amounted to more than £62,000, and he had accumulated £8,000 of debt.

‘I lost everything – my entire £30,000 from the house sale, all £10,000 of my savings and even started borrowing from my pension,’ Arthur says.

Like so many fraud victims, he felt too ashamed to contact the banks and turned to the internet to solve the problem himself. This is where he was, almost unbelievably, scammed for a second time.

He found Online Justice, which promised to help fraud victims recover money after a downpayment of £5,000.

When Arthur said he could not afford the fee, it offered to start the case for £199.

He was sent requests for additional payments over the next few months without seeing a penny of his lost money.

His bank statements reveal the disturbing pattern. It began with £119 to Online Justice in September 2023, followed by a series of seven payments to a company called CyberSheli Ltd: These are all sites posing as legitimate businesses of the same name.

‘It added up to over £2,000,’ Arthur explains. ‘I was scammed all over again and just felt broken.’

He finally mustered the energy to contact National Fraud Helpline (NFH) solicitors, who last month recovered £21,000 from HSBC. ‘It means a lot to get some of the money back,’ he says. ‘I owed my sister £2,000 for vet bills for Patch, so I paid her back.’

NFH lawyer Charlie Quail says: ‘Sadly, this is a classic romance scam where a fraudster has preyed on someone who is vulnerable. The victim was cruelly tricked into falling in love with someone who didn’t exist.’

There is, though, a happy ending for Arthur. He reconnected with Mary on Facebook, a woman he had dated 40 years earlier. Today, they live in Doncaster with Patch.

Despite knowing he was scammed, Arthur still tells himself his money helped someone in need. ‘Maybe it’s easier to believe I helped a single mum than admit that I was scammed by a gang.’

A HSBC spokesperson said: ‘If you receive an unexpected request to send money from an online relationship there’s a good chance it’s a romance scam. People can help protect themselves by taking note of fraud warnings when making payments.’

Banks must reimburse victims of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud if you’re tricked into sending money to scammers through a UK bank transfer. There are exceptions, such as if the customer acted fraudulently.

If you believe you’ve been scammed, report it to your bank immediately and actionfraud.police.uk or call 0300 123 2040.

You can appeal the decision with the bank if the response is unsatisfactory and file a claim with the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Have you lost money to a romance fraud? Email [email protected]