Last year we were contacted by the sister of a woman in her 60s who had been ensnared in a sinister romance scam and had fallen in love with a man who called himself Donald.
The woman’s family were distraught and knew she was being conned. They were afraid that, as well as having her heart broken, she’d also lose all her money.
Despite their best efforts, their worst fears were realised and the woman could not be persuaded to sever ties with a man who, she believed, loved her.
Eventually, the wool cleared from her eyes but not before she was left with huge debts and a potential legal headache that could prolong her nightmare.
RM Block
Last week the woman asked us to share her story with readers in the hope that her experience might save others from being conned by an unscrupulous cohort of criminals that prey on some of the most vulnerable people.
When we were told the first part of this story last year we called the woman Mary, although that is not her real name. We will stick with that name now.
Mary joined a dating site in the late summer of 2023, thinking little of it.
“A couple of weeks later I got a notification to say this man had liked my profile so I wrote to him and said hello and almost immediately he came back to me and the conversation began,” she says.
It was all “very natural and he seemed sincere and interested in me”, Mary says.
Within days, the man who called himself Donald asked if they could move the conversation off the dating platform and on to WhatsApp.
Things moved quickly after that and within a couple of weeks Donald was saying he had strong feelings for Mary, who felt the same way.
He told her he lived in an affluent Dublin suburb but before a meet-up could be arranged he needed to travel to Germany to work on a lucrative telecommunications project.
“He sent me a link to his website, which looked very professional and very impressive,” Mary says. “He explained that he had a major telecoms contract with a Japanese company and had to travel to somewhere remote in the east of Germany.”
She told one of her sisters she was developing a relationship with a man she had met online and the sister urged caution.
Mary asked Donald for a video call to put her mind at ease. “He got quite angry about this and asked if I did not trust him,” she says.
The video call was arranged but it was glitchy and didn’t last long. It was enough, however, to convince her that Donald was a real person.
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Mary had recently returned from a long time overseas and had a limited social circle in Ireland. She was also suffering from both mental and physical ill health.
“I was vulnerable and he seemed supportive and kind,” Mary says.
Not long after Donald left for Germany, she got a panicked message.
“He said the proxy server where he was wasn’t working. I don’t know what a proxy server is, to be honest,” she recalls with a dry laugh.
He explained that his team of telecoms engineers had made a pig’s ear of some key processes and he needed to order some equipment urgently. But he couldn’t make the payments because he couldn’t use his computer as a result of the proxy server issues.
Mary was asked if she could make the payments for him if he gave her his bank details. She was not asked for any money at this stage.
Donald directed her to a website and she logged on to what looked like a legitimate bank – one based in the US – using his details. His name and picture popped up and she couldn’t help but notice the balance on the account was more than €1 million.
She was given the details of three people to make payments to using this US account and Donald explained how urgent it was.
“The first two transactions went through successfully and I got confirmation codes but there was a problem with the third transaction and I got a message notification from the bank saying there was a security issue.”
Donald told Mary he would have to ring his bank to get it sorted out.
“About half an hour later he came back and said he had been talking to the bank who said it was not possible to fix the security issue over the phone.”
Donald said he’d been told he would need to travel to Berlin to resolve the problem but he couldn’t leave the site because of the crisis and “he had to supervise the work”.
The scam was starting in earnest.
“I can’t remember if he asked me or if I offered to send the people the money,” she says. “I know it was €7,000. That was the first amount I sent.”
She transferred the cash from her own savings to a woman who, Donald said, was working for the Japanese firm he was working for.
“He was so grateful and was telling me that he never knew that a woman like me existed and I was really helping him out because he was really stuck. The following day he said he needed more money but he assured me he wouldn’t need any after that. I ended up sending another €20,000 to that woman.”
By this stage Donald had declared his love for Mary and was talking about marriage and she believed him.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” she says.
As their relationship blossomed Donald experienced multiple setbacks to his telecoms project in Germany.
“He told me there was an accident on the site and chemicals had exploded so he needed more money. He asked if I could send him some via Bitcoin,” Mary says.
Mary did not have a bitcoin account but Donald helped her to set one up. She admits she’s not tech savvy and the process was laborious. “He was getting frustrated with me and I became very angry,” she says.
When her bitcoin account was eventually set up, he calmed down and apologised and explained that he was under a lot of stress but Mary was still angry.
“I went to bed and I was so furious I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I wrote to him and said: ‘How dare you treat me the way you did. I don’t even know you yet. I’ve spent all my time you know trying to help you and you were abusing me.”
Then Donald rang her – for the first time – and they talked it out.
While he was born in Cork and lived in Dublin, he had been raised in Cyprus, he said, which explained his accent. “It wasn’t too much of an accent but it was there. I’ve no idea what a Cyprus accent sounds like,” she says. “But there was a slight something different about it that you could have ascribed it to being from Cyprus.”
After the call things were better for Mary and Donald.
“We talked about everything,” she says. “We could be on the phone for hours every day or every second day, I was convinced it was a real relationship. The calls got quite intimate.”
Donald was “the most empathetic person I’d ever met. He was so sweet and so kind and could listen really well. We had fun and laughs on the phone. I thought he was fabulous and I loved him”, Mary says.
One day he phoned and explained that he was due a payment from the Japanese company that would be released to him once the project was finished. He said the firm couldn’t send the cheque to his bank account because it was frozen so he asked Mary if she could take receipt of the cheque and mind it for him.
The cheque for €1.4 million arrived and she stored it safely, secure in the knowledge that once it was cashed she would get her money back.
Mary’s sisters – who did not know the scale of the problem – were still trying to convince her it was a scam. One had used a reverse image search to establish that the picture Donald said was him was actually a happily married gay man in San Francisco with an active Facebook account.
When Mary shared this news with Donald he told her he had no social media presence and someone had stolen his pictures and was pretending to be him.
“It didn’t seem too implausible then,” she says.
What Mary wanted more than anything was to meet Donald. The plan was that when he came home they would move into his house. There was a couple of times he was due home but the plans changed at the last minute.
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Just before Christmas 2023, or five months into the scam, Donald said there was an issue with some documents he needed to cash the cheque Mary had. The issue meant he had no choice but to travel to Japan to sort it out.
When he travelled there he needed money for accommodation and legal representation, which Mary covered because he was still having banking issues.
Then he needed more money to pay staff. And again Mary covered it all.
She believed there was a solid emotional bond between them and she felt a responsibility to him. “He was relying on me to get this done and once it was done he was going to retire and we were going to live together.”
Things did not go well for Donald in Japan, however.
He fell ill and needed hospital treatment. “He gave me a list of all the things that were wrong with him and it was all very serious. Then I didn’t hear from him for a while because he was on such strong drugs and was sleeping all the time.”
Mary was getting increasingly anxious but Donald was increasingly leaning on her for support. “His situation seemed desperate, and he was sick.”
Because of issues over the contract, worker wages, illness and recuperation, and banks Donald could not return to Ireland and Mary kept sending him money.
Over the 17 months she was in the relationship she transferred €291,292 to Donald.
About €70,000 came from her life savings. When that account was cleaned out she took out three different loans amounting to €72,000 and then took out a lifetime equity loan on her home.
She will be repaying the loans for the next 10 years while the equity loan will follow her to the grave.
She made dozens of payments to Donald with the only limits being the daily transfer limits imposed by her banks. Most of the money was sent in cryptocurrency to his bitcoin account.
Eventually, after one large payment to cover – she was told – the last tranche of workers’ wages was sent, Mary started feeling optimistic that soon she and her beloved would be sharing his home in Dublin. And, of course, she still had the cheque stored safely at home.
“I’d started buying clothes and I was thinking about what I was going to wear when I met him for the first time.
She asked him where they would be living although she had already seen his address on the bank account he had got her to log into months earlier.
“He gave it to me and when I looked it up I realised that the house in question had been sold in January 2023.”
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She got back to him and he started giving her conflicting information about the property and slowly she started to realisethat Donald was not who he said he was.
“I went through all the messages right from the start and could see where the demands for money became more intense and I realised how ludicrous the things he was saying were. But in those moments everything seemed like an emergency and I didn’t step back long enough to actually assess it properly. And he was so desperate and in such an emotional state,” she says.
She confronted Donald and he denied it and suggested it was her family members who were trying to come between them and working to turn her against him.
Donald mentioned their spiritual bond and said they were effectively, although not legally, already married. He pleaded with her and highlighted all they had been through together.
But for Mary the game was up.
“I was shocked. I was horrified and I felt so stupid,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that somebody could be this sympathetic and still do something so horrible. He’d come on the phone and he’d be so sweet and we’d talk so sweetly and he had so much interest in my life and everyday happenings and all the rest of it. He was actually my best friend. I really thought he loved me and I loved him and then to realise he was just some shithead.”
The story had another awful twist, however.
Mary reported the case to the guards last spring and mentioned in her report that she had allowed her account to be used by Donald to transfer money raised for essential medical treatments for his supervisor’s wife in Japan into a bitcoin account he controlled.
“I was told this person who needed the treatment had a relative in England who was going to raise money for the operation [but] she didn’t know how to operate bitcoin. I said that’s fine so that money came through and I sent it back thinking this is for the supervisor’s wife. It was over €400,000. It was only when I went to the police that they told me that this was money most likely stolen from somebody else.”
As a result, she has left herself exposed to charges of money laundering and acting as a money mule. While she has yet to be charged, she accepts that that could be the next phase of this story.
As for the €291,000 she sent to Donald? “There’s no hope of ever getting it back. It is just gone.”
