translated from Spanish: “He used a fake face and bled me out”: the woman who sent thousands of dollars to her internet love who turned out to be a con man

That’s how she described herself as the victim of a scam that lost nearly $35,000 in loans to a man she met on a dating app.
The 40-year-old living in Wales, UK, “cited” the man in a video chat for two years. He was unaware that his “love” used a fake face designed by computer graphics to deceive him.
This is not an isolated case in that country. Police estimate that approximately 1,000 such scams occur per week in the region controlled by the south Wales police force alone.
“This guy absolutely bled me out,” the victim acknowledged to a BBC radio show.
“I think he would have taken me to the grave, ” he added.
Police are now working with the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to find the scammer.
South Wales police handle 1,000 scams a week.” Even my friends trusted him”
The fraudster told the victim, after he started talking, that he was a businessman living in Dallas, Texas, a city she had visited several times.
“He told me he wanted to buy a place and move to the UK so he could start a business here. That night – or the day after, I think – I was supposed to go back to Dallas,” the victim said.
“He called me as soon as he came back to Dallas, basically he called me on video every day. So he built his reputation, to the point that everyone trusted him. Even my friends believed him because he also kept video calls with them,” he added.
But the alleged businessman had taken a picture of the internet and manipulated it digitally into moving convincingly as he spoke.
After a couple of months, the man said he was in trouble on a business trip to Dubai. He claimed that a girl got in the way of her car and that she had to pay for her medical care for the authorities to return her documents.
“Now I analyze everything and I know that for a moment I thought something wasn’t right, but somehow it made sense back then. I sent him the money to pay his dues. He even sent me a picture where he was with the girl in the hospital.
“I didn’t think it was a scam. It was connected to a ventilator and looked genuine. There was nothing in the photo that revealed the fraud,” the victim said.
The woman took out a $7,800 loan and sent him the money. He had “lostly fallen in love with the guy,” he says.
The woman asked for loans and help to send money to the scammer. But there they did not end their apparent problems, which were accumulating.
On one occasion when he said he was on his way to visit him in the UK, the man claimed to have been arrested for a tax default of $27,000.
The woman paid for it with more loans and with the help of a friendship.
However, in his last attempt at scam he included some clearly fake documents. That’s when the victim realized she’d been ripped off.
“I just wanted to cry. My friends were with me for days to support me,” he lamented.
He now maintains two jobs and is starting a third party so he can pay his debts.
“Lists of Fools”
Fraudsters share “fool lists” to repeatedly address vulnerable people, according to Inspector Nick Bellamy, head of the South Wales police organised crime unit.
“This is serious. It’s not a kind of crime we can investigate and then arrest the culprits in our own way. These are thieves with tricks and what we’re trying to do is make people able to identify those tricks,” Bellamy said.

Original source in Spanish