A mum-of-two who lost £35,000 to a highly convincing scam says she still suffers nightmares in which she begs for her money back.
The woman, from Canterbury, who has asked KentOnline not to be named, says she felt ashamed and depressed after criminals stole her and her husband’s life savings in the course of just one week.
For months, she kept the fraud secret from her husband and, when she finally told him, the couple almost separated.
“I fell into depression,” she said. “I had broken the trust with my husband, and the guilt was killing me.
“I would be walking down the road and I’d find myself crying. I had nightmares of me begging on my knees, wearing rags, and the fraudsters living in luxury and laughing at me.
“Then I’d wake up crying and sweating.”
The woman’s nightmare began in March 2023, when she was looking for extra work she could do from home to supplement her income as a healthcare support worker.
“The rent was killing us as a family,” said the 48-year-old, who has a masters degree in business.
“We had to let go of a lot of luxuries and comforts to save for a deposit for a house. We were barely living.”
After looking for jobs online, she received a text message offering her a casual job working from home for up to £100 a week, for what appeared to be a legitimate digital service company.
“It was like an answer to a prayer,” she said, checking out the company online to make sure it was genuine.
“The amount they were going to pay didn’t sound outrageous, so I was comfortable with it, and it meant I could save £100 a week for a house deposit. They said all I needed was a phone and a wi-fi connection.”
The woman was given a log-in to a fake e-commerce web page, where she would complete simple tasks to optimise websites for large companies, including Tesla and LinkedIn.
The scammers set up an account with crypto and currency platform OKX, and deposited £500 for her to trade with.
An amount would come out of her account for each task she completed, with the promise of a refund and a commission payment on top when her ‘wages’ were due.
At first, her account was credited with £40 in payment, but before long her OKX account was empty and her mentor told her she had gone into a negative balance. The scammer said she would have to deposit her own money to continue working.
The criminals told her it would be easier to deposit the money by transferring cash from her Halifax bank account to her Monzo account before sending it on to OKX.
Before long, she was sending huge sums as her job task payments sucked up all her money, depositing £35,720 in nine payments between March 11 and March 16, 2023.
I thought ‘how can I tell my husband?’ I needed to get this money back. I was afraid to tell him, and I was afraid he would ask to see the savings account…
All along, she was told she would get her money back plus wages.
“It got to a point that I was already sucked in, and it was as if I was under a spell,” she said.
“All I wanted to do was get my own money back. So I was using our savings, and borrowing from friends and family, to get my money out. But I got sucked in more and more, chasing the money.
“I thought ‘how can I tell my husband?’ I needed to get this money back. I was afraid to tell him, and I was afraid he would ask to see the savings account.”
The scammers told her that if she did not make a payment she would lose all her money and her account would be closed.
“I thought ‘oh my goodness, I need to pay so my money does not get stuck’,” she added.
The woman said the whole experience seemed real, with members of a WhatsApp group exchanging messages, giving tips and talking about what they had earned.
“Now I realise all of those people were fake,” she added. “I couldn’t believe I had been lied to. I thought I was smart.
“I was ashamed of myself. From then, I couldn’t trust myself with money, and now, my husband doesn’t allow me to keep money.”
Now, two years after the scam, the woman has enlisted the help of the National Fraud Helpline to try to reclaim her money.
Monzo has already rejected the case, but she is hopeful of a more positive result with Halifax.
Banks have obligations from regulators to help protect their customers from fraud.
Martin Richardson, a senior partner at National Fraud Helpline, said: “Sadly, it is very common that scams cause huge tensions in relationships. We often hear of families breaking up after someone has fallen victim to fraud.
“This is a very typical job task scam which seem to be on the rise.
“With people’s finances being stretched the idea of earning some money on the side by working from home is a very attractive proposition.
“We would stress that no job requires you to put in money to get your wages released.”
