A 69-year-old widower was left homeless after being conned out of £85,000 in a cruel romance scam
Rodrick Lodge thought he’d met the woman of his dreams but he ended up losing his £85,000 life savings and has been left homeless after falling victim to a romance scam
A lonely widower’s dream woman turned out to be complete fantasy and he has been scammed out of his £85,000 life savings.
The penny finally dropped for former aid worker Rodrick Lodge, 69, after he flew to Kenya, expecting to spend the rest of his life with the beauty. When he touched down in the East African country’s capital Nairobi no one was there to meet him.
The sickening reality began to dawn on him. He had fallen victim to a classic, age-old romance swindle. An exasperated, penniless Rodrick told us: “I’ve been such a fool. It feels like my life is over.” He had fallen in love with what he thought was his Kenyan bride-to-be “Anita” after messaging her for months from the UK.
He ended up sending her a fortune, via the wire service M-Pesa Kenya, so she could build their dream home. He also paid for her medical bills, tuition fees and other costs. Anita sent him photos of progress on the four-bedroom detached house, which Rodrick now knows does not exist. He had been put in touch with Anita by a woman called Mary.
He first met Mary while working in Nairobi in 2020, a year after Pauline, his wife of 25 years, sadly died. Rodrick, who has worked as a humanitarian aid worker across Africa, said: “I’ve known her since 2020 and I thought she was a friend.
“I even helped her out with a bit of money over the years, paid for car repairs, things like that. Looking back I now realise it was so bizarre. Last summer Mary told me she had a friend, Anita, who lived in Karen, a suburb of Nairobi. She put me in touch with her.
“We started exchanging messages on Viber. She told me she was MD of a beauty company and had 30 employees. She sounded successful, she said she was having a house built in Voi, about 200 miles from Nairobi.”
He said Anita, who told him she was 39, would send him pictures of the house. She also sent him a number of intimate pictures, which he has lost. It was all via message and he never spoke to her directly. In September, their messages turned towards talk of marriage and living together. Rodrick agreed to pay a dowry to her and started helping with the cost of the new house.
He said: “She was sending pictures of solar panels and water pumps. I thought it was going well. Then, in November, she told me she had to go to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to market her products. She said there were cash flow problems and the business didn’t have enough money. So I paid for that too. She’d send pictures of her and her friends in Kigali [capital of Rwanda], it looked like she was doing well.”
Rodrick finally travelled to Nairobi to meet Anita in December – having never met her or even spoken to her. When he landed there was no sign of her... instead she messaged saying she was 300 miles away in Mombasa. She spent months making excuses to not meet him, while still asking for cash. All the time he was racking up more bills staying in an Airbnb.
He said: “She was always putting things off, making excuses. I realise now I was such a fool. I should have stopped it there and then. In May she said her dad was in a particular hospital and she needed help with the bills. But when we checked, there was no one with his name there. That finished it.”
After this, all contact with Anita stopped but Rodrick, from Send, near Guildford, Surrey, was left stranded and broke in Kenya. In total he says he sent her 15 million Kenyan shillings – more than £85,000. He has tried to contact Mary but she is not responding.
He reported the alleged con to Kenyan police in Kitengela but believes he will never see his money again. This week he finally returned to the UK after scraping together his £600 airfare from friends. He says he is homeless and being put up in a Travelodge by a council until Tuesday.
Rodrick Lodge flew all the way to Nairobi but no one was there to meet him ( Image: AFP/Getty Images)
He said: “I doubt that Anita even exists. I’ve no idea who I’ve been communicating with. I’m in such a mess. My bank accounts have been frozen because I’ve gone overdrawn, I can’t get access to my pensions and I’ve got nowhere to live. I’ve been a giving person all my life and I aimed to retire to Kenya and marry Anita.
“I’ve been so stupid. She never existed. It was a creation. I’m totally lost. I have zero cash and am relying on a couple of friends. I’m going to be a poor man for a long time. It was all a scam, I realise that now. I have no family, no kids that can help me. It’s over for me.”
Police in Kenya were contacted for comment. Rodrick has sought help from Richardson Hartley Law to try to get his money back. Partner Martin Richardson said: “It is a classic case of a romance scam.” He said they had been in contact with Rodrick’s bank in the UK to remind them of their obligations to protect vulnerable people.
Mr Richardson said they have reminded the bank of the voluntary code many have signed up to. He said the code puts certain obligations on the banking institutions to protect vulnerable people like Rodrick from this type of scam. It also identifies the customers in their banking database who do have vulnerabilities that would make them more likely to be a victim of this scam.
He said: “When these large sums of money were being transferred we would have expected, in accordance with that voluntary code, the bank to have made pretty stringent enquiries as to why the monies were suddenly being moved in such large sums. If those obligations had been followed we think this scam could have been either stopped completely or stopped a lot earlier.”
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