He faked illness to con me out of £20k

NationalWorld.com

A woman has told how she was conned out of £20k by a "callous" romance fraudster - who convinced her he was sick and needed the money for private medical care.  Suzanne Famula met Christopher Harris, 41, a car salesman, on an online dating site in November 2020.

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00:00 I just thought I was helping someone in need and trying to be a nice person to

00:07 help someone out who I thought was really poorly and wasn't as poorly as

00:13 they said they were. I even showed like my friends his profile and there was it

00:17 was all very normal. He said he had a normal job, operations manager at a

00:20 dealership. To me that's a normal run-of-the-mill job. He didn't have that

00:25 job. We first met in the December off and on for a few months and then got

00:29 a bit more serious in the May. He just asked me money for like mortgage,

00:33 council tax, bills, hospital stays, like going private and then I realised after

00:42 a couple of months that it was all a lie. It's also getting the banks to realise

00:47 that just because you meet them in person doesn't mean it's just theft. It

00:52 is fraud because they're lying about what they need the money for like he did

00:58 to me. They didn't take that into account at all and I had to take them to the

01:02 financial ombudsman which was 18 months of back and forth, back and forth. It's a

01:08 hard process and it's a long process but it is worth doing. It gets your money

01:12 back. If it makes the authorities and more people aware that of the effect

01:18 that it has on you as a person and what it does to you it also might make them

01:23 act a bit quicker.

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