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Next Gen Romance Scams with Anna Rowe

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“How can you make genuine informed consent when someone is deceiving you at that level?” - Anna Rowe Share on X

Scammers have gone from postal mail and faxes to email and phone calls where you never see the person, but now with AI, you can even have a live video call that seems completely real with deep fake technology. It’s no longer safe to just see a person, but there are other things you can do to know if you’re communicating with the individual they claim to be.

Today’s guest is Anna Rowe. Anna is the founder of Catch the Catfish and co-founder of LoveSaid. She is a Subject Matter Expert in Romance Fraud and Victim Support.

“It’s very misunderstood, the age range that this crime affects. A lot of people think it’s just older women, but this isn’t a gendered crime. It’s very much an even split between males and females. Victims can be as young as their… Share on X

Show Notes:

“Voice cloning is huge and it is used very widespread across lots of types of scams.” - Anna Rowe Share on X

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Transcript:

Anna, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Can you give myself and the audience a little background about who you are and what you do?

My name's Anna Rowe, and I'm actually a single mom and primary school teacher in my paid work. Back in 2017, I was catfished. I'd never heard of that term before that point, actually.

I met a guy on Tinder in 2015 in August. He, in hindsight, groomed me for three months before he came offline to meet his victims in person. He was using his own face, obviously, but he was leading a double life with a complete fake identity and a separate phone number for the activities that he was taking out, the fake emails, Skype accounts, full set of fake social media, you name it. Mine wasn't a financial motivation, but his was a sexual motivation. I was with him for 14 months in total.

When I discovered that he wasn't who he said he was, I tracked him down, actually, into his real life and discovered that he was married. He wasn't the person that he described as being a divorced father of three, starting out on the dating scene again. Everything he told me was a lie. It absolutely crushed me, having been in a bad relationship previously, which he very much used against me. All of that information he collected through that grooming process.

Everything he told me was a lie. It absolutely crushed me, having been in a bad relationship previously, which he very much used against me. All of that information he collected through that grooming process. -Anna Rowe Share on X

I went to the police. They didn't want to know. When I discovered that there were other victims involved, I went to the police. They still didn't want to know, and then I went public with my story to start a petition about getting the laws clarified around what he was doing, because with the amount of deception that he was using, the question was and other lawyers as well had said, “How can you really make genuine informed consent when somebody is deceiving you to that level?”

As I went public with my story, lots and lots of other women started coming forward. There are actually 17 of us that I know of now with two aggressive rapes, a sexual assault, and a handful of what's called sex by deception. My case is still sitting within our justice system, if you can call it that, seven years later. It's a long time. They say the police did eventually investigate it, but it's still sitting in the system.

My experience led me to be in a really suicidal state. I went to see a therapist, and it was a therapist that actually told me to go and research narcissists and psychopaths. It was that that started my healing process, because my biggest problem about being able to move on was not understanding how he got under my skin and how he'd got me so hooked, because I'm not that kind of person as a role. It was a real eye-opener to be able to read other people's experiences of that personality type.

It was jaw-dropping that reading other people's experiences of the types of things that their abuser would say to them was almost like a script. It was ridiculously like a script. It was then that I learned about the grooming and the love-bombing, or also known as the psychopath's love hook. I really wanted somewhere to put all that information with relevance to my situation, because there was nowhere.

It was jaw-dropping that reading other people's experiences of the types of things that their abuser would say to them was almost like a script. It was ridiculously like a script. -Anna Rowe Share on X

I then founded my website, Catch the Catfish, and very quickly had lots and lots of people with similar experience to me start to come forward. But then I started getting lots of people email me where it was clear that the intent behind that fake identity was financial.

I am a teacher, I am a lifelong learner, and I am a bit of a detective. After being able to track down who the photos belong to and helping those victims, I decided I needed to go and find out who was behind it, who was doing this, because I was getting a lot of people. That's when I discovered that the people that carry out this particular fraud are mainly originating in West Africa. They are known as Yahoo boys. I started educating myself as I do when I don't know something about those.

I started getting a lot of information, and COVID was just hitting at that point. I thought, “I've got to be able to put all this information somewhere so that people can learn from it to prevent this happening, what to look out for,” because there was quite a clear pattern to what was happening on particular profiles and things. That's when my pages across social media started to build.

I had found the groups where the scammers train each other and where they share all their tools and their tips. It's really, really helpful for me. Not only did I get a deeper understanding of who these people were and what they were doing, but I could then share that information very quickly to the outside world in a way that they could then recognize and learn from.

It's got to a point, I wasn't allowed to do anything publicly while my case was being investigated. The victim platform, if you like, I've got to a point where I'm helping about 75–100 victims a week now around my part-time teaching job, and that's global. It's not just limited to people here in the UK. I get people from all over the globe from all demographics.

It's very misunderstood the age range that this crime affects. A lot of people think it's just older women, but this isn't a gendered crime. It's very much an even split between males and females. Victims can be as young as in their 20s right up until 80-plus.

It's very misunderstood the age range that this crime affects. A lot of people think it's just older women, but this isn't a gendered crime. It's very much an even split between males and females. Victims can be as young as in… Share on X

Romance fraud in itself is also on a really, really huge spectrum. Like I said, it can either be in-person where it's a financial thing. It can be mine that wasn't financial, but in-person up to where it's online only. Included within that romance fraud, you can get sextortion blackmail as well. Sextortion can also be a standalone fraud, all perpetuated by the same people, funnily enough.

In dealing with the scammers, do you think of these romance fraudsters that are on the Internet only, is this just one tool in their toolkit?

No, absolutely not. The groups very clearly show this huge spectrum of frauds that they commit. They're known as 419 scams in Nigerian legislation. The Ghanaians are very big in this as well. Although they've got the name of Sakawa boys, the actual fraud is called Yahoo, which is because they very first started messaging on the Yahoo Messenger platform. That's where that name originally came from.

It really has evolved. We hear about the old classic Nigerian prince penpal letters. When emails were created, that gave them access worldwide on a much larger scale. Of course, when social media and dating platforms came along, it opened up doors again. These frauds evolved from there.

As well as those, when we find the pet scams that are on the Internet, that's also these fraudsters. Employment scams are also these same fraudsters. There's pet insurance, there are hookup ads, there are drug ads, you name it. Things that are committed online are very, very likely to be these same Yahoo boys that are perpetrating the scams. It's widespread.

We have also got, over the last couple of years, coming out of Southeast Asia, I don't know if you've heard a vile name, pig butchering. That's perpetrated by Chinese crime syndicates and it's carried out. It was just investment fraud originally that was hitting mainly over in China, obviously, but went global.

Criminals are very, very good at collaborating, with romance fraud being one of the best working tools of the Yahoo boys and investment fraud being the best working tool of the Chinese crime syndicates. They've got together, and we've got the combination with the criminal name of pig butchering. That's also got a really tragic side to it because the people that are being forced to carry out those scams have also been human-trafficked.

Why pay employees when you can just traffic people and get to work for free, so to speak?

Exactly. With the Yahoo boys, that's on different levels as well. People think that it's all just boys sitting in internet cafes, but there's a hierarchy of these particular scammers. You've got on the very bottom rung, the newbies, as they're called. I gave them that name, but then that was clarified by someone over in Nigeria, which was really quite comforting.

I'd nicknamed them the newbies because it was really obvious that they were just starting out. You get lads like that that are either doing it on their own or with a friend just coming into this. Then there's a middle group, where they get trained in what's called the Hustler's Kingdom, within the training groups or on Facebook groups that they have all fairly easy to access. They're very brazen on Facebook. Just type Yahoo Updates and you can find those kinds of things.

Facebook has just had a purge after there's been quite a lot of publicity about it. They will say, “We want 10 boys to train in Hustler's Kingdom.” They will then get messages. They will bring them into lodgings, train them, and then give 10% or 20% cut of any cash out, as they call it.

You've got the top of the food chain, which is the huge, again, organized crime syndicates. One of those is called Black Axe—that’s a really famous one. There's quite a lot of information about them on the Internet, but they are a cult-style mafia with a global reach. They are also involved with drug trafficking, sex trafficking, you name it. They're the big guys, the big guns, business email compromise, you name it, the mortgage scams. You've heard of the scams with the mortgages?

No, that's a new one.

Have you not heard of those?

I don't think so.

They hack into the real estate emails and lawyers’ emails. At that point where the money's about to transfer, they will then send an email saying, “This is where you need to send the money.”

They hack into the real estate emails and lawyers’ emails. At that point where the money's about to transfer, they will then send an email saying, “This is where you need to send the money.” -Anna Rowe Share on X

Got you.

Yeah, and that's how they get the money out of them. Again, hundreds of thousands.

When people are making their down payments for property, it could be large amounts of money.

Exactly. They're the ones that are up there. It's them that use romance fraud victims on a big scale to launder money as well. Romance fraud victims are also used in chains to launder their stolen money, whether that's in the smaller groups as well. If they're organized enough, victims won't realize that it's happening.

They'll have been told it would have all been very much built into the story over a period of months, and then they'll get asked, “My banking's still blocked while I'm away, do you think you can take this so I don't lose the payment coming in, and then you can send it on to me when I get home and sort it out, the banking, that kind of thing?” They do that.

The big organized crime, when they've done the business email compromise, they need somewhere to send those packets. Some victims will say to me, “I'm talking to this person, but they've never ever asked me for money. Are they a scammer?” You have to say, “Well, actually, they like using victims to do lots of other things, whether it's opening up the bank accounts with the big story that's behind it, saving for the wedding that's coming, that kind of thing, and anything.” They will just use them for anything that they need. It is that organized; it's quite frightening.

Yeah, definitely. There was a new story recently where someone was a victim of a scam. They were told to go to the bank, get a bunch of cash, wrap it in a loom foil, for whatever weird reason, and bundled up. “Someone will come and pick it up from you.”

When this person came to pick it up, they assumed that this person was part of the scammer network and shot and killed the person. It was just someone doing Uber packages. This person, all they knew was to go pick up a package and take it from A to B. They have nothing to do with the scam, yet now it ends up with them getting shot over it.

There are so many consequences for the behaviors of others. It's really frightening. It can happen in so many ways. They do have legitimate pickers. They're known as pickers in the scamming world, where they will go and do the collecting from, but it's normally from the stations, if you like, where people can send stuff, drop-offs, that kind of thing. They'll go and pick it up from there and send it on as an end person to the laundry. Or they have shell accounts.

That's the other thing I see a lot of with the victims that come to me, where people will have a shell business, where money is being paid into. Obviously, that's a really good way of hiding the money then going back out, and it will be that end person that then sends it off to Nigeria over there at the end of the chain kind of thing. It's really frightening.

I have seen a lot of construction businesses that very much get in on all of that. They must be making quite a lot of money for doing it. It's horrible. Car dealers and construction companies.

Entities that have larger average transaction sizes so it doesn't raise red flags for the banks.

Absolutely. It's very clever. Sneaky.

With you having snuck your way into some of these groups where these fraudsters hang out and being able to watch them over a period of time, what's their newest technique? What are they trying to do now or in the future looking to do?

Very much. Where the stories tend to stay pretty much the same with the addition of the pig butchering that's going on there, these particular scammers, it's technology that has upped their game in a big way. What we've been seeing lately is the use of AI and AI-powered apps, and that is right across the board.

Starting with the really simple, where photoshopping for them used to be quite a problem unless you were really skilled at it. There are scammers that do that as a job; they call themselves the editors. We all know what Photoshop used to be like, doing it freehand with a mouse around your head and that kind of stuff. You'd end up with a square head. I have got some really cracking examples of bad photoshopping over the years.

But now with AI-powered apps, background removal can make it almost seamless. They can literally put any head on anything, and it can look so realistic. Not only that, we've also got the software where they blend a face onto another picture. That makes it even more seamless in some respects. If they've got a particular face that they want to use or a new face to replace a lot of the very commonly used ones, but the pictures are good because the story is good.

But now with AI-powered apps, background removal can make it almost seamless. They can literally put any head on anything, and it can look so realistic. Not only that, we've also got the software where they blend a face onto… Share on X

For example, Captain Thomas, as he's known, he’s from Denmark, I believe Captain Thomas Lindegard. He's so well-used in the scams because he's always got his hat on. He works for Maersk, the big company, often these beautiful pictures on the ships with the sun setting behind him and everything else. They love him for use in these scams, but then that will very easily show up on a reverse image search.

Now, they got someone with a similar look but a different face. They will blend that face onto those pictures. I'm that sad that when I got sent a picture with the blended face, I recognized Captain Thomas's hair. How serious is that? I know that's Captain Thomas, but that's not his face. Went and found for the victim to show her, “Now, look. This is what they've done. They've taken this and they've done this.”

They can also do that with video clips, where they blend the face onto a video to send a lot of talking pictures, if you like, as well. Talking pictures are something else that they've got AI for, where they can literally use one picture. They use type-to-speech and make the picture talk. I've seen those evolve from really rubbish to now where the head will move slightly and it will blink while they're talking.

They can also do that with video clips, where they blend the face onto a video to send a lot of talking pictures, if you like, as well. Talking pictures are something else that they've got AI for, where they can literally use one… Share on X

The problem with those is that it hasn't got the ability yet to upload a cloned voice to match the real person's voice, and it tends to be a little bit stilted. We're talking about that kind of voice. It's an AI-generated synthetic voice rather than it being a natural voice. To be fair to the victims and laughable at the scammers, that's what catches them out a lot of the time because when that sort of thing gets sent, it sets off that warning sign, which is great.

It's just that the voice just doesn't sound quite right. A little bit too robotic, not enough emotion behind the words.

It's like one of those adverts online, where they've got someone. It's just not quite right. Like I said, that does tend to send off the warning signs that something's not right there, which is brilliant.

Voice cloning is huge, and that's used very widely across a lot of frauds. We were talking earlier about the parent scams. That's often used in those as well. They literally only need 30 seconds of some voice and use it to clone it.

There are particular platforms. I've just been working on a unit of work with two incredible students from the University of Portsmouth here in the UK. They've helped me research what apps give the best quality versus cost. Frighteningly, the ones that were best were free.

I don't want to hear that.

Isn't it bad? It's awful. You got a big free trial, and then it was $1.99 a month or something like that, so tiny amounts of money, really. We used one of my really good friends, Becky Holmes. She might be someone that you'd like to talk to actually. She's just written a book called Keanu Reeves is Not in Love with You.

I just interviewed her. I don't know if the episode is live yet as we're recording, but I've just recently talked with Becky. It's a great interview.

She's hilarious. She's absolutely brilliant.

Go buy Becky's book, everybody.

It's amazing. What started off for her as something lighthearted to keep her amused turned into a passion project. It's genius the way that she's interspersed the education side with the takedown of the scammers. It's an absolute class. I love it.

Becky lent her pictures and her voice to work with on this project, which was brilliant. We used her for voice cloning. It is terrifying how good it is. When I played it back to Becky, you know what Becky's like, she can be a little bit sweary. She was like, […]. Excuse my French, but that was what she said. Rightly so because it was really frightening; it was scary how good it was.

Especially the middle version put breaths in, which was a huge step forward with clones that I'd been sent, which were very robotic. I could hear how the victims had thought it was a particular person's voice because I know the voices quite well, and I could hear it in there. Like we said, the quality was a bit poor. There was a bit of background noise there that you wouldn't normally hear. These ones had put breaths at each sentence, and this was text-to-speech.

The next one, the exaggerated one, even put ums and ahs in and a lot of intonation. It was frightening. Of course, we've got the deepfakes. These scammers have moved away from using a saved video with the device facing another device, where they can either save that video from stories which then disappear, which is a tactic that they use quite a lot and then either from lives. Everybody does lives now on their platforms, and all they've got to do is screen record while that live is on.

They've got a long piece of video that they can then use on these fake video calls. They themselves can be really convincing, or as we said, if they haven't got a long piece, they will put a reconnecting sign over the saved video so that they can then say, “Oh, there's a problem with the audio.” They'll be going, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Something that the victim can't, but it's just enough.

If somebody sees that on a live video call that they think, “Oh, it is them,” the victim said, “but I see them on the video call.” Luckily, from the training groups, I can show them how they're doing that. But now with deep-fake technology, one picture, they can sit in front of a camera, have that image superimposed, and then sit there just like we are.

As long as they stay looking straight, and this was something that was really good with the research that we've just done, we learned using all the different software where the limitations are, what they can do and what they can't do to distort that image. That means we can then warn people on what to ask them to do.

When I first started the podcast, it's probably about a little over four years ago now, that was one of the talking points. Just ask the person to go live on a video because that was the best way to see who they really claim to be. If they keep having excuses, that's a good indicator that something fishy is going on. But I don't think that's a safe thing to say, just because they can do a video doesn't mean they are real. What are some of the limitations of the software where you might be able to start seeing it?

It's improving fast, but still at the moment, if they open their mouth too wide, it doesn't like inside the mouth. That looks really strange and it distorts. The other thing is turning too far to either side. It doesn't like the side view, and it distorts and becomes strange. That's definitely what needs to be done.

We would have said before, they couldn't do this, but now they can already. Putting your hand in front before has blocked the way that it worked, but it's got over that already somehow. They can take glasses on and off, which they couldn't do before. I've got one where they're taking glasses off. Male to female isn't a problem either. It can work either way.

Can you do stuff like, “Hey, hold something up for me”? Can they still be able to do that?

Yeah, they can. But definitely the movement from side to side does distort. It stretches the picture, and you can tell quite easily then that that's wrong. Like we are, how often when you're sitting on the video call are you doing that?

You wouldn't expect someone to be looking left or looking right unless you're asking about their dog in the background or something like, “Hey, what's that in the background?”

What they can't do if it's a laptop setup is get up and walk around the room with it, but the mobile phone application means that they can nap. Again, we would have said, ask them to get up and go and get something. “Go and get me a picture of someone.”

“Show me around your apartment.”

“Go and show me around.” That would have been a really good indication of there being a problem, whether it was the saved one or not. The mobile version of that would work sadly, which is a shame. It's still going to have the same limitations side to side.

What's the accepted advice now in the counter fraud space for when you're dealing with someone? Whether you think they are or they might be a scammer, what's the wisdom these days?

There are different things we can do. If you're not speaking to anyone, but you get that request coming or a message sent, there are things before you get involved, before those feelings start getting involved, that you can do that are quite clear; simple little things to check on a profile. There are particular professions to look out for.

They love the military because there's quite an air of mystery around the profession. Unless you've got family or friends in that profession, you're unlikely to know the ins and outs of how things are done. It is a little bit secretive.

Same with the doctors. They're used very much within the military, but also in investment frauds as well. You're not going to get any real doctors or military ever randomly requesting or messaging. They've got codes of conduct they're supposed to follow. It's just not something that they're going to do.

The next big one is oil rig workers. They love offshore workers. Again, there is an absolute air of mystery and unknown about that profession. What I can tell you straight off is that scammers will say that they're on those rigs for six months to a year. No oil rig worker is on a rig for more than three weeks. It depends, between one and three weeks depending on the strenuous nature of the particular job that they're doing on it.

If they have three weeks on the rig, they're three weeks off the rig. However long they spend on, that's how long they're off. The scammers don't like that, obviously. They will also say that there are problems with Wi-Fi. Oil rigs have some of the highest speed Wi-Fi on those rigs that ever there is.

The companies that they work for pay for all the transport. They do not pay for their own transport on and off of those rigs. I think they're in quite short supply, oil rig workers, offshore workers, and marine engineers.

If they live in-country, for example like in the States, they will often pay for transport to get to the sea or the area where the helicopters are to then take them off to the rigs as well. They obviously have medical professionals, all the food and supplies that they need on those rigs. The excuses that the scammers come up with for that kind of thing is nonsense. That's important to remember.

Same with the military. They're one of the richest organizations out there. Military don't have to pay for anything. They don't have to pay for leave. They earn holidays in exactly the same way as normal jobs, but the scammers will absolutely exploit the unknown in any reason that they can.

After that, we've got construction workers, so architects, engineers, construction workers, and contractors. As long as they're working abroad, they're really examples and ways. It's called a contract format.

Something will happen obviously down the line, where they need to complete that contract, but something's gone wrong. Either tools have been broken or they've asked for something else, but it would've been built into the story way back about the bank being blocked.

They will be sending fake documentation about, “I've managed to get all of this money together from other business associates. I've just needed a little bit more. I'm going to lose this contract and the payments.” That's how they go about it.

You've got luxury goods dealers. There are some scammers that will use cars, property, jewelry, jewels, gold, diamonds, that kind of thing. It's hard to think that that's even a real thing.

I actually had one the other day that was a gold investment scam. I was like, “Do they really do that?” We went off and found a website that was actually a gold investment platform. I was like, “Really?” But yeah, and for diamonds. They are real things, but just really rare.

They'll use anything like that that's obviously a money earner to get in there. Anything to do with Bitcoin or anyone that asked you anything to do with cryptocurrencies, I would say run a mile. It's still completely unregulated. I know a lot of people are really into it and some people have made money off of it, but there is absolutely no regulation. Scammers use it for everything.

I definitely see that one a lot. A lot of people approach me saying, “Hey, I moved my crypto,” or, “I bought on this platform, but I can't log in now. My password doesn't work. Can you help me get my password back?” I'm like, “Hmm. The website says they've been around for 20 years, but the domain was bought last week.”

Yeah, and there are little checks if you know how to do things like that. On a basic profile, any of those professions. But they will also, depending on what platform it is, you'll see widowed or divorced. There is always a sob story in those first, initial messages. I call it the four Cs, five since COVID. They'll say that the wife either died in childbirth, of cancer, in a car crash, or they cheated, normally with a friend, or died of COVID. I call it the four Cs, but now five.

There is always a sob story in those first, initial messages. I call it the four Cs, five since COVID. They'll say that the wife either died in childbirth, of cancer, in a car crash, or they cheated, normally with a friend, or died… Share on X

They're normally orphaned, or they've only got one elderly relative. They very often got a child. That's how they build this reality around the victim of they are the only person they can trust because there's only them in their life. They will center the victim in the middle of their world with this responsibility around them in that manipulation.

They very often put on profiles about being God-fearing, honest, genuine. There's that over-exaggeration of the most wonderful, humble, loyal, on those profiles. It's almost like reverse psychology. This is what they need you to see when it's actually the opposite.

I always worry when people start saying, “Trust me.” To me, it's like, “Why do you think I wouldn't trust you?” It's almost more alarming when they're trying to convince me that they're trustworthy. If I go to the bank, the bank teller doesn't say, “Trust me, I'll make sure this gets in your bank account.”

Yeah, why are you pushing that on me? Why are you pushing that so much? It's absolutely true. If the account is private, taking a look through the following is another thing to do because they'll often be just one gender that they're following. The scammers will make a point if it's a male one, either following or women, vice versa.

If you're sometimes a little bit sneaky, I put on my post all the time about always being nosy and have a little hunt around those profiles. Right at the beginning of the people that follow it, when those accounts were originally made, the algorithms on the platforms generally push it out as a suggestion to people in the locality. You'll then find followers from a different country that don't match what's being told with the pictures and the story on the profile.

Also if they've hacked a profile, because do you know you can go in the “about” section now on Instagram? Even if it looks like a really old profile, it could have been hacked. If you go back to the first original post, sometimes when it's an anonymous post—not a face, but a picture of a landscape or a quote or something—they might be old, but then the rest of them would have been added quite recently, normally in batches.

They often forget that there's something in the tagged section. That's how we've caught quite a few out, by going to the tagged section. Then there are pictures of people from certain countries, or it doesn't match again. It's a cake shop, one that's been hacked or something like that. All the tagged posts were about cake decorating or something like that.

There are lots of ways of spying on those profiles. Facebook, it's more looking at the people that have liked the pictures because they do tend to follow their own fake profiles. They will forget that they're liking the pictures that come up in the feed. You come a bit of a cropper there. Or you go in and look at the pages that it's following, and you'll start seeing things that don't quite match the profile. Sometimes big pages over in Nigeria with the 234 code and that kind of thing. I'd just say be your own detective.

The link on the profiles on Facebook is often on the fake profiles with a different name. It's the original name that the profile was set up with rather than the name that's on it afterwards. That's a good place to go and look.

The profile URL is Bob Smith, and the person's claiming to be Anna Rowe.

Exactly. Or it would say, it's Wizzy instead of Donna Smith. Yeah, exactly. It's always good just to go and have a little hunt and be nosy around those. But once you've got past that, and if you haven't realized, and you're in with it already talking, then it's very difficult to see because there's scientific proof out there that when somebody's in that first hit of love, if you like, the chemicals in the brain actually stop you looking logically at things. All of that's out the window and you're not going to see it.

What you will notice is how you're feeling. This was very much what happened in my experience. What I noticed with victims from this kind of fraud, when they were sending me their messages, was the parallels between the messages that mine sent me throughout that love-bombing, that grooming, and the messages that these fraudsters were using. It was so ridiculously similar. It was then I realized that they were adopting that script. It's very well-documented because it works and it is so powerful.

It's right across the board, whether it's in a domestic-abuse relationship, which is also where this coercive controlling behavior stems from, including all that love-bombing at the start. It makes you feel like it's a rush. It's an absolute rush. It's a good anxiety feeling at the beginning, but it all happens incredibly quickly.

That movement of the relationship is fast. It's really fast and it's consuming. It's really consuming. If you're feeling like that in any relationship, it's a bit of a warning sign that something isn't right, whether it's because of a narcissist or an abusive partner, or whether it's a fraudster using similar tactics. It works.

Isn't that one of the challenges, though? They're using a technique to switch you out of a logical mode into an emotional mode. Are you less likely to see it at that point now?

You absolutely are. That's the message that we're trying to put out there now, which is to recognize that feeling. Rather than thinking about a tick list, the scammers do change up things. When they know that we know, they can change that tick list up. They'll be more careful about who they're following.

We always used to say it will be a new profile. Now they buy all the followers and they can make it look huge and really genuine rather than people blaming themselves if they've missed three ticks on the checklist kind of thing.

That feeling inside is always going to be the same in these instances. There is that overwhelming rush of good anxiety. It's when they're creating that soulmate connection that, as humans, we dream of. It's that once-in-a-lifetime thing that you don't ever want to lose.

That feeling is addictive. When they start putting you on the emotional rollercoaster, that is called trauma-bonding. After they've created this crazy, intense relationship around you, where they've literally centered you in the middle of their world, you're the only person that can help them, they then do something like going quiet or disappearing for a weekend.

For me, for example, what that made me do was blame, “What have I done wrong? Have I upset them? Have I done something? If they ghosted me, they can come back?” What it does is it creates a trauma to make you fear what's gone wrong, and then they'll come back, and then they'll plaster you with love again. They've done it, they've created that bond.

The other thing that these scammers do is create a trauma that happens in their life. That's where the ask comes in. Mine did the same. Even though finance wasn't involved with mine, mine stood here in front of me. This was a six-foot lawyer stood here in front of me with tears in his eyes, telling me that his mom had been diagnosed with cancer—that C again.

He went into great lengths about the symptoms that she'd had and the treatments that she was going to need. It was so traumatic. I was devastated for him. If any, if it had been true, it would be devastating. He didn't even talk to his mom. It was all done very specifically to keep me close and compliant. It also meant that in the future, if we'd made plans as part of the future-faking that they do, he could then get out of it by saying his mom's health had taken a turn for the worse, and I was never going to put pressure on him for that kind of thing.

It's always done for a very manipulative reason. It's all very premeditated in storytelling. And these scammers are no different. They create a situation where the victim then almost feels responsible to make things OK for this person that they are now completely hooked to. It's very, very coercive and controlling in that way because the big team then, they're also within that money ask normally put under a time pressure, which also creates a problem.

A lot of people think that in these scenarios that it's just the victim and one character, but like Cecilia's, there's a cast around these victims. It's not just one person. They have a whole cast around the victims. There will be a child, friends, colleagues, normally a lawyer with particular types of scams they will bring in. They're called package scams where they will say that they're sending the victim a gift, and there might be important documents in there again because they're the only person the scammer can trust with those kinds of things.

They'll take pictures of it, they'll video what's in the package, and then sometime down the line they will get a call from a courier company or an email from a courier company saying, “Oh, it's arrived at the customs.” You'll likely get a call or be asked to pay import taxes on the box before it can be delivered. That's where they get the money.

These scammers are really clever. They will create fake websites that give you a tracking number. The victims put the tracking number in. The scammers control what's seen on the screen after the journey that the package is taking. It all looks really legitimate.

What was the point for you where you were able to realize, “Oh, wait. This guy is not legit,” that this whole thing is a scam?

It was. We were together in-person for six months. He was able to do what he did because he was actually away from home all week working. Little did we know that there was a wife and three children still where he lived.

He was here. Literally the night of our six-month anniversary, he was due to be coming back, but I'd been poorly. Here in the UK, we had Brexit happen. He'd said he worked in legal in aviation and he did, but he just didn't give me his proper job title and where he worked.

For them, it was a really big deal. For five months, he kept me on the hook, so I gave him an out a lot of times, like five times over five months. I'd said to him, because he said his mom's health had taken a turn for the worse, and I was like, “Do you just want to leave this for now? I don't want you to be so stressed,” and he'd flip on me all the time. “Please don't leave me. I can't do this without you. This is just a difficult phase we're going through.” All of that stuff.

The longer I was away from him, that hold he had over me started to dwindle. That gut instinct, again, that feeling where I should have listened to my gut instinct when I was feeling those bad vibes about things, for example, I'll never forget sitting here after he told me, it was a couple of days after he told me about his mom being diagnosed with cancer, and I had one of those bad vibes. I sat here and thought to myself, “Nobody could be that evil that they would lie about them having cancer, would they?”

And because my expectation of me and other humans is that I could never lie about my mom having cancer, I then felt bad that I was even thinking it about someone else, so I squashed it. As he was away from me, I started listening more to that. It got to a point five months down the line—because he already knew I was the kind of person that wouldn't give up on someone else because I told him that in that whole grooming bit—I went back online. I set my profile up again.

At that time, Tinder was attached to Facebook. When you set it up, it brought up your details from your family, including your profile picture. It had my name, my age, and my location on it. All I did was swap my profile picture out for a stock image. I wasn't obviously intending to talk with anybody, I just wanted to see if he was online because I was getting the paranoia that I should have had all along was right. I was listening to it.

I went online, put in the same search parameters. Within 20 swipes, I'd come across his profile. I won't ever forget that feeling of the world dropping out from under me. I messaged him on WhatsApp because he said he was away at the time. I said, “I need to talk to you.” He said, “Just text me. What’s wrong?” I said, “I'm not doing this over text.”

He said, “I'm at a table with clients.” I said, “I'm not doing this over text. I need you to call me.” And he did. I said, “I'm just leaving the table.” He got up and he called me because he was saying, “I'm really worried. Is it your health? Is something wrong with your parents, darling?” Then I sent him the picture of the profile that I'd found.

I said, “What's this?” He said, “I don't know what you mean.” I said, “I've just found this online.” Luckily for him at that point, I had just read an article where people were getting caught out because they thought if they deleted the app off their phone that it deleted their profile. I'd literally just read that article a couple of weeks ago. He said, “I deleted the app off my phone when we met. I don't understand.” I was like, “Oh, maybe he's telling the truth.” So I let it go.

Two days later, he'd gone radio silent, which was very unlike him. I set my profile up again, but it hadn't deleted my profile, obviously, because it doesn't because I hadn't deleted it before. I just deleted the app. I put the app back on my phone again.

As it sprung to life, it suddenly came up with, “You've got a match.” I was like, “How?” Then it said, “You've got a message.” I was like, “How?” I hadn't realized that when I found his profile, I'd swiped on it. He, obviously using that profile all the time, still had matched with me without realizing and then messaged me.

In the message box, it was the exact same message as he'd sent me 14 months prior. “Hi, Anna, it's Anthony. Let me start: where are you based?” It was exactly the same. This was about 10:00 PM. I started chatting with him, and he didn't realize it was me. That's how many women he was messaging that had my name, my location, my age. He didn't realize it was me.

My name's not that common. It's not like a biblical name, like Sarah or Elizabeth. It's a little bit more unusual than that here anyway. I chatted away with him and I thought, “OK, I'm going to ask some questions like, ‘How long have you been on here?’” He went, “Oh, I'm all new to this.” Just the same old story as I'd got.

Things were a bit different in that he was moving very quickly. Whereas we'd stayed on the app for about three weeks before we exchanged phone numbers, he wanted a phone number then and there. I was like, “Shit, I don't have another phone number.” I was like, “Oh, it's too late. I'll think about it. I'll let you know tomorrow.”

I got my dad's phone, and he didn't have WhatsApp. I set WhatsApp on my dad's phone, and then I messaged him from that. The following night, I sat with my phone and my dad's phone messaging him from both. My world was falling apart at that point.

The phone conversations that we'd had over the three months, he was sending in shortened versions of voice notes already on WhatsApp. It got to the point where it had been about an hour, and I just couldn't do it any longer. He did this constantly in his life. I couldn't keep it up for an hour. I was physically sick.

He was asking for more pictures, and I sent him pictures of me on the other chat. One of those posters said, “If people got paid for lying, I know some people that would be millionaires,” and sent him that. He sent me kisses, sickly enough, on both, and then blocked me.

At that point, I just thought I'd been played. I just thought he's a player. I've been done again. I've found an […]. Something that was really niggling me still. A couple of days later, again, I just read about reverse image searches, which is also obviously a really good thing for people to do.

Those scammers are using much newer pictures now, which don't show, but it's still worth having a go, but his pictures didn't come up on any of them until I put the one photograph from his dating profile, which we'd always joked about. It was a really old photograph. It wasn't him. He'd obviously put that there as a way for friends and family not to recognize him, but it was a clever enough chosen photograph, even down to the dimple in his chin, just of a bloke wearing a suit.

He joked it off saying that it was his old corporate photograph, and he'd got a bit more hair. It was good enough that he could get away with, “I'm 15 years older now, but I really hate having my photo taken, and I don't want lots of photos all over that.” I'd seen tons of the real him before I met him in person. He was a chameleon. He looked different in every photograph, only I could tell because I knew his face from lots of different angles.

I'd seen tons of the real him before I met him in person. He was a chameleon. He looked different in every photograph, only I could tell because I knew his face from lots of different angles. -Anna Rowe Share on X

It was a picture of a Bollywood actor because he was Indian. I never watched any Bollywood movies. I didn't have a clue who that bloke was, and it was just a man wearing a suit. That came up as being someone else. That was my what-the-fuck moment.

I started doing a bit of research into that actor. There were some of the things about that actor's past and childhood that he'd used in his story. I've got a ridiculously good memory. I started looking up what he'd told me about himself. I was like, “If he's told me that he works in legal, surely he's got to be on the solicitor's role somewhere,” but I couldn't find him anywhere. I knew he told me he was born in a certain place, and it was on the fake Facebook profile, all of that, about where he was born.

As a family historian, I've then got access to all the birth, marriage, and death records. I'm on there—nothing. I'm like, “Shit, who is this man?” Then I started being a bit more of a detective. Between myself and some friends, we matched with him a lot while I was trying to get more information out of him. He hadn't blocked me on text messages.

I was keeping in touch with him as myself every now and again, just asking him, “Look, I know something's not right here. Can you just talk to me about why you're doing what you're doing?” Always complete refusal. It took me six weeks to track him down. It was a cold November night and I was matched with him. It was very easy to match with him. He had a pattern of behavior.

It was this that also started putting off real worrying spidey senses, because it was clear that he had a very predatory pattern of behavior. He was always matching between six and seven in the morning, that's when all the matches would ping through. He had a very specific time that he was doing all of this, and it was a lot. It was really easy to match with him.

I was remembering everything that he told me, but also when we were matched, it tells you how far they are from your device. I was tracking that. I was seeing where he was on the weekends. How far away was he? How far away was he in the daytime in the week? How far away was he at night? It was clear that he was a very specific distance away in the day, in the week. It was a very specific distance on the weekends. It was the night times that were random.

I knew that he told me he came through a particular tunnel on the way home because he'd say the signal might cut out. “I'm just going through such-and-such a place.” This was round where this distance was where he said he worked to me.

One night I just said, “I'm going that way. I'm going to drive that way.” They'd said that he had offices in Canary Wharf in the same area. We were driving up that way, and the distance was coming down on the match, so I knew it was going in the right direction.

As we got to the tunnel, there was a signpost for a particular airport. I hadn't even realized it was there, to be honest, even though I live not that far away. He told me about all the big airports that he used to go off to do work. He'd never mentioned this one.

I said to my friend, “He's there. All the reverse psychology, he's never mentioned that one. That's where he is.” We drove into this tiny airport. As I came through the barriers of the car park, because there's only a short stay car park, I came into the car park, and in front of me was a car with nearly exactly the same number plate or by the last digit. I just stopped and I was like, that can't be a coincidence because it was a semi-private plate. It was just the last letter that was different.

We drove round and parked up. Within five minutes, he walked down the steps of the office. He's there. I hadn't seen him for six months at that point, and he was standing in front of me smoking a cigarette on the steps. My friend got out and went and asked for a light and then followed him back up into the building. It was a big double-fronted building.

As he went in, I saw him appear in the top three floors, the top window on the left, and then I recognized the backdrop to a lot of photos he'd sent me. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is ridiculous.” He came back down and said, “It's the legal team that is on the top floor.” I was like, “OK.”

We went to that airport on LinkedIn, looked up the employees, and came across this profile without a photograph. I looked at the name and I said, “That's him.” I said, “Look, he's shortened his last name and he's lengthened his first name.” We put that name into the Internet—the real one—and up came one picture, which was a black and white corporate picture of him in a suit. That's the only picture of him that there is online or was.

I took two weeks to then investigate him under his real name. I think at the end of that two weeks, I knew more about him than he did because I am a bit like that. I'm like a dog with a bone, and I know how to use public records and do investigations. He's got a very unusual name, and that's why I never had his name put in the press, because I didn't want his family to be harassed because they're easy to find.

That was when I found out he was actually married. He knew how I felt about that kind of thing because my children's father had cheated on me. That was another massive punch in the stomach to know that he'd made me the other woman. Not only that, but I found out long-term that there were five of us over the time that I was with him, including him being married. He'd literally put me in an open relationship without my consent.

Do you know how long he'd been doing this with other people? Was this a pattern for most of his life or something that just happened recently?

Over 12 years at the time. It'd been a very long time. The latest back, a victim had come to me was about 2007–2008, at that point. It had been going on for a long time, but his behavior evolved. It was always the same grooming process. That was very prevalent. And the same MO.

He built the expectation pretty much. Again like the online scammers, he built the story around him that he wanted you to know. Within that, he built the expectations of what the relationship would be like. He said that he worked away, that he flew abroad. He very much stressed that it was about quality of time together over quantity of time together, that kind of thing.

How it worked out with him saying that he worked abroad quite as much as he did, it enabled him to actually have us on a rotor system. I would see him two or three nights, one week, and only one night the week before. That's when he'd be seeing someone else more and then me less. It was like that.

It was because of his work because he worked a long, long way from home, five-to-six hours away from home that he was able to do what he did, because he was never at home. He was never with his family in the week. He was literally using us.

That's awful.

He'd asked several of us to marry him. It was all so much future-faking, very common in that personality type. Yeah, horrible.

Awful. How much of this story is available on your website?

You can read about me on my petition bit. There's a shortened version of it there. There's also a radio interview on my website. He's a famous radio presenter here, Jeremy Vine. I was just really fortunate and privileged that people started coming and asking me to do things with them after I'd gone public with my story.

It can be overwhelming at times when you're constantly regurgitating those feelings. But for me, it helps more people than I'm overwhelmed by it. I know that it empowers people. Even when people hear my story that was an in-person, non-financial fraud, they recognize that journey they've been on and that manipulation that they went through, because it is so similar, and that helps them to know that this wasn't their fault. This is something that's powerful that they were put through.

It's not that anybody falls for these scams, it's that they were targeted and they were exploited in them. It's really important that we use that kind of language and not victim-blaming language in these kinds of scams because it's really damaging.

It's not that anybody falls for these scams, it's that they were targeted and they were exploited in them. It's really important that we use that kind of language and not victim-blaming language in these kinds of scams because it's… Share on X

What's the hardest thing for someone who's been a victim of this? What's the biggest hurdle that they need to overcome or work through in order to be able to talk about it with someone like you or law enforcement?

It's really hard. What people don't understand is that for victims, it's like a triple trauma. You're not only going through grieving for the loss of a relationship, and it's a relationship like you've never known in your life. You're also grieving the loss of the person that you thought existed and loved you because that person didn't even exist in these situations. Then you've got the loss of money on top of that.

The majority of victims that come to me—I’d say 95%—working through that destruction of trust is the hardest thing for them to get through. It's not just the destruction of trust in other humans, it's the lack of trust in yourself to ever be able to recognize a good human being again.

It's not just the destruction of trust in other humans, it's the lack of trust in yourself to ever be able to recognize a good human being again. -Anna Rowe Share on X

This is a quote actually that I found and it hit the nail on the head so much, and it resonated across my pages with people. “When you've had your emotions, your ethics, and your morals manipulated so skillfully, trusting yourself again becomes the hardest part of recovery.” That's why it's really important for victims to be able to come and talk to other victims and know that they're not alone in this, men and women alike. It's the same for everybody.

It's really important that they know that if they can come and talk to us, it's a non-judgmental environment in every sense. People are comforted by that and just people getting it. It's so hard for people on the outside to get what that manipulation is like if you haven't been through it yourself, but we get it. It's what's a bit unique about us as an organization. We have LoveSaid now as well, and we are a support service for victims run by victims.

Also, I'm really privileged now that I get to work with some brilliant police officers. We help them to understand what the victims have been through. We can help to change and shape how they support victims to make that second part of the journey, should the victim be brave enough to go on that second part of the journey, less traumatic.

At the moment with our banking systems and a lot of police, I know, especially over in America, I hear this a lot from American victims, they're just laughed at when they go to the police and told it's your fault because they don't understand that coercion. They don't get it. They did not knowingly, willingly give their money. It was coerced out of them.

They were manipulated into doing it.

They absolutely were, yeah. That's why here, we're really fortunate that that has been recognized. Now banks are now being held accountable as well, because at the end of the day, banks put themselves forward as being experts in fraud. They make billions off the back of the victims that use their services. But then when they can see that those transactions are going out of a victim's account and they do nothing to stop it, even though they can see it happening, where's the accountability there that they're enabling that to happen?

We had originally, and it is until October, a voluntary code called the Contingent Reimbursement Model, where banks who considered that their fraud strategies were strong, they can sign up to this strategy if you like. It means that they will pay 50% or more of the money back if it can be found that they didn't take enough measures to stop this happening. It's been very good as far as it makes them a bit more proactive in looking for this within their service.

They've got skin in the game.

Exactly. This becomes mandatory here in October, so all of them have got to be signed up to it. Now the banks are starting to shout about social media being held accountable, and rightly so. For me, it should be shared between both of them. But our banks have shown here that between 70% and 80% of their reported fraud comes from Meta platforms. It's a lot.

When again, we think about the amount of money that Meta is making off the back of the users through advertising, where's the incentive for them to get rid of all those fake profiles?

Yeah, that's the unfortunate thing.

Yeah, they're making a fortune off of the audience reach to charge advertisers, even though we estimate between 40% and 50% of those profiles are fake.

That's scary.

And then you've got the fake adverts on top of that.

I see a line of discussion going here.

It's a never-ending one. I told you there wouldn't be anything short to talk about here.

Again, what are the websites that people go to for more resources?

Catch the Catfish is a huge resource in itself. For someone that wants to go and have a look if they think they might be talking to a scammer, there's a full description of the different types of questions that they use, of the stories that they might tell.

If it's someone that has been through it but doesn't feel comfortable enough to yet come and talk to somebody, there are pages that show about adult grooming and the love-bombing. It helps you recognize what you've been through. You can always get in touch as well.

LoveSaid is our umbrella organization that houses a lot more how-to guides, safeguards about what to do if you've been scammed as well. It breaks down how to get those profiles safe, for example, if the scammers know where you are, how to get profile links changed, how to get everything private, how to disable it if necessary, all of that kind of thing. You can get in touch with us on either of those platforms. It's www.lovesaid.org or www.catchthecatfish.com.

Awesome. Anna, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

You are very welcome. It's been lovely. Thank you for having me.

 

 

 

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