Gran loses £10,000 to scammer who pretended to be famous TV actor
A grandmother lost £10,000 after falling for an online scam which saw the fraudster pose as TV actor Sam Heughan.
Mary Ryland, 72, was obviously excited when she appeared to have received a message on Instagram from the Outlander star last year. However, retired florist Mary was sceptical - and the scammer sent her a photo of a fake passport to convince her they were the real deal.
After chatting for two months, Mary, who is based in Cornwall, was then convinced to deposit £5,000 into a cryptocurrency account. The fraudster sent her fake graphs which said her investment was growing. She was then convinced by the scammers to send a further £5,000 to "activate" the wallet and withdraw her money.
Mary eventually realised she had been scammed after reading about another woman who had fallen victim to a similar scam. She said: "It fooled me terribly. It was horrible. I really thought it was Sam.
"The scammer even sent me a passport with a name, date and it really fooled me. I think I'm a bit of a sucker for a sob story and celebrity impersonators. I don't want it to happen to others - it must be stopped. Instagram should know that a lot of people who post on those sites are scammers. Before you realise they've sucked you in quite badly."
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Mary only started using the social media platform to chat with other people as she lives with her disabled husband who "doesn't talk much". She often posts comments on an Outlander fan page and thinks this is where the scammer spotted her, in January 2023.
Mary said the scammer tried to make it a romantic thing in the beginning and she opened up telling them she would like a new car and home. This was when the scammer first mentioned Bitcoin. After the scammer knew Mary was going to invest, she was instructed by the scammer to contact someone else through WhatsApp.
She said: "I always had to notify this person before I would invest and he would walk me through the whole system. I couldn't put anything lower than a £1,000 in and that was tricky as we're both pensioners. But over time they started dropping the threshold down when they wanted more and more money to encourage me to keep putting in money.
"It had a separate bitcoin wallet every time I'd put money in and I guess it was filtered through to their account. It looked as if the money was growing and they would encourage me to keep investing."
When Mary realised she had been scammed, she ceased all communication with the scammer. However, she was unable to claim back the cash she had lost. While her bank wasn't able to help, Mary is hoping she has better luck with the Financial Ombudsman.
She said: "What I really want to get across to women is to just be careful - they are so sophisticated now these scammers. If I can help somebody not go through what I've been through then I've done my job. I just thought it's about time all this was stopped.
"There must be lots of other ladies in a similar situation. I'm a pensioner so we don't want to be giving our hard earn pennies to someone. A lot of them are improvising other people and they can be quite influential people."
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