The online partner who turned a bank account into a money tunnel.
A woman in her fifties, recently widowed, met a man on a dating app who said he was a marine engineer working offshore. They spoke every day for four months.
He never made a video call — the ship’s connection, he said. Then his contract payment was “held by compliance”, and he asked whether a colleague could send his wages to her account so he could pay his mother’s hospital bill. Over six weeks, eleven deposits arrived from eleven different names. She forwarded each one within a day, as asked, in amounts just under ten thousand dollars. The bank closed her account without warning on the twelfth.
