Iris Jones, a British pensioner, is threatened with death. She fights against scammers who target older women like her.
The Liverpool Echo reports on British pensioner Iris Jones from Somerset. After her love affair with the Egyptian Mohamed Ibrahim, who is 47 years her junior, she wants to spare other pensioners their fate. She has made it her mission to expose other love fraudsters and is supposed to pay for it with her life.
The pensioner describes the scammers’ scams to the Liverpool Echo. The men would specifically approach older women on dating platforms or on Facebook. She suspects there is a system behind it, as the scammers would contact her “like on an assembly line”. For them it’s all about the money: “They don’t think of you as a person, for them you’re just a name,” Jones tells the newspaper.
A more common trick is to claim to be a member of an army or an oil company. Then the scammers often sent pictures of soldiers and oil workers. “These pictures are not her – they are pictures of real men, and I think some of them know that they are being used,” says the pensioner indignantly.
In the Liverpool Echo, Jones identifies some suspicious news that pensioners should be suspicious of. Most of the time, the love scammers would want to communicate on WhatsApp after a short time because it is more private. “This is a red flag,” warns Jones.
Once they had built up trust in this way, it didn’t take long for the scammers to ask for money. They were often instructed to keep the transfer “secret” and not to process it through a bank. To convince the victims, Jones describes another popular strategy: so-called “love bombing”. The pensioners are showered with declarations of love.
Jones tells of a particularly bold case. A man posed as a member of the American Air Force in Yemen. Jones tells the newspaper that she was able to expose him quickly: “His messages didn’t sound American.” The pensioner was completely sure when the man asked her to send him money.
Jones recounts how she went into it for fun, to provoke the scammer. When she finally confronted the love scammer, the man showed his true colors. Jones recalls the shocking chat messages: “I’m going to bombard you. This time not with love bombing, but with a real bomb.”
In Germany, too, there are always cases in which people are duped by love scammers. It was only in March 2024 that a woman transferred 160,000 euros to a man who claimed to be a successful businessman. Here too, exuberant expressions of love preceded the payment.
The police warn urgently against such scams and call the love scam “the modern form of marriage fraud”. In most cases, the perpetrators acted from abroad and took advantage of the victims’ shame. Many would not file criminal charges, which is why it can be assumed that the number of unreported cases is high.
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