‘Dating app conman took me for £90k - he left me financially and emotionally depleted’
Kirsty Belmont, from North Yorkshire, has told how she was taken in by a supposed charming businessman who took all her money in an elaborate scam after she used a dating site
A woman has told how she was left “without food” after being “financially and emotionally depleted” in an elaborate £90,000 dating scam.
Kirsty Belmont said she struck up a relationship with a supposed businessman called Luke and was tricked by the conman, having been vulnerable after her 14 year marriage came to an end. She became sucked in when the man claimed he had been mugged on a business trip to Istanbul and asked her to transfer funds from one of his accounts to another as he needed money to get home.
The mum-of-four admitted she was nervous about moving £69,000 between the accounts but the transactions went through okay and she was not using her own money.
But it was at that point that the 43-year-old was tricked into parting with her own money and ended up losing £90,000 in just six months.
The supposed part-Cypriot businessman, who had won her over by being witty and intelligent on the phone, said that she had locked him out of his account and he needed money to get by which soon built up.
“This man took everything from me and left me totally financially and emotionally depleted,” she told The Sun. “It all unravelled just before Christmas and my parents helped buy my children’s presents because I had given him so much and was in financial difficulty. I was totally bereft by that point. I was robbing Peter to pay Paul and I went without food so I could feed the children. Everything was on a knife’s edge.”
The man said that he lived near her in Yorkshire and even had a local accent after they met on Plenty of Fish in June, 2023. She also did an online check of images and she didn’t see anything unusual so she believed him when he claimed he had fallen in love.
“I didn’t say it back,” says Kirsty. “I was very cautious and just said thank you. But I also hadn’t heard those sorts of things for a long, long time and I was flattered.” But it was all a build up to stealing money from her by saying he had been robbed in Turkey and he even showed her photos of his bruised face.
When she was asked to do the bank transfer she noticed that he had around 600,000 euros in his account and she could see transactions dating back a long time. However, even though she had made the transfer, “Luke” claimed it had not gone through properly.
She continued: “He called to say I’d locked him out of his account by accident and he needed £6,250 to get by. I felt like I had to help because I was the one that had caused him problems. Then he needed money to pay the hotel he had stayed in so I transferred more, then it was food, then flights and then he said he couldn’t pay me back until he got to his head office in Cyprus and he needed cash for that as well.
“All the time I was haemorrhaging money. He veered between really grateful for my help and being angry because I’d supposedly locked him out of his account.” She added: “Over the course of six months I gave him about £90,000. The more money I gave him the more invested I felt in helping him get into a situation where he could pay me back.”
And it was Kirsty’s sister who worked out the scam after making a long search online where she eventually found a link to a semi-professional footballer in London who clearly wasn’t the man she had been talking to on the phone.
She contacted North Yorkshire Police over what happened but she has been unable to recover the money. Kirsty is now telling her story to try and raise awareness about romance scams which cost victims over £99million last year according to Action Fraud data.