A criminal would be more than foolish to use their actual address and even if they did the chances of it offering an accurate location are slim to none. The emails had been sent from a fine dining restaurant on Amsterdam's oldest canal (the Oudezijds Voorburgwal) and St. There she was roller blading, posing alongside a Despicable Me minion and in St Petersburg's Hookah Box smoking bar.
Russian model Avrora Shreder was being impersonated by Irina An email from Irina An email from Henry to Irina - she didn't get the Coronation Street references I emailed 'Irina Love', a 31-year-old "lonely lady" from Russia who lived with her mum, sister and cat Button and was known as Honey to friends.īut Irina was a poor man's Monica and was more careless.Ī search of her photos' metadata revealed they were actually of a Russian Instagram model called Avrora Shreder. I logged back in to my old email account to find, buried among a flurry of emails telling me how to 'grow my manhood' or alleviate constipation, messages from new prospective partners.
I was back on the dating scene and immediately went crazy. With a twinge of sadness I decided it was time to move on. She was 100% fake but whether due to getting cold feet or being caught her, and to an extent my own, weeks of grafting were rendered fruitless. She had not even asked me for money before she vanished. Monica's first email to HenryĪ two-week romance fraud awareness campaign launched at the start of the year by City of London Police provided a bullet point list of things to look out for.įraudsters would move the conversation to text and wouldn't answer basic questions about themselves or provide details about their day-to-day lives. Maybe she really was a lonely singleton looking love. She confessed her deepest desires – enough at points to give poor Norris a heart attack – and said she wanted to come to Chatham to meet me, a widowed veteran suffering from severe loneliness.Īt times I found myself questioning whether she was even a fraudster.
There were little details about her day-to-day life, her family and her Labrador named Bullet. She may have fallen for my soap-inspired alter-ego but her emails were almost convincing. It's 10pm and my partner is in the room next door but I'm busy flirting with Korean/Ukrainian internet Monica while trying to find something, anything, which could give away her true identity. And now, here I was, in a baggy t-shirt, the buzzing desk lamp making my brow sweat, craning my neck and squinting at the screen of my laptop, a bottle of beer within groping distance.
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