Dublin woman loses €25,000 to a scammer posing as Chris Martin
The finance worker, using the pseudonym Sinead, said she was initially contacted by the scammer on Twitter after she responded to a post by Coldplay’s management on the social network.
A Dublin woman has told how she was scammed out of €25,000 by a fraudster pretending to be Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin.
The finance worker, using the pseudonym Sinead, said she was initially contacted by the scammer on Twitter after she responded to a post by Coldplay’s management on the social network. She told RTE: “He sent me a message via Twitter with images of Chris Martin and Chris Martin’s name on the account.
“He asked me for my phone number. I was quite dazzled. I didn’t believe it was true initially, but then I was like ‘could it be?’ I gave my number and he contacted me via WhatsApp and Facebook with fake Chris Martin accounts and then he contacted me on Skype.
“He was like ‘keep this to ourselves, I can’t really go public because I’m a big name star, so I don’t want you to talk to anyone about me talking to you. I want you to keep it secret.
“Then he moved it onto Skype and he was manipulating me and started grooming me a bit more. He built up trust and he was very smooth. He’d be humorous, he’d be kind with his words towards me.
“It was friendly initially and then he started saying ‘I’m interested in you and I like what I see in your pictures’. He got to the point where he started asking me for flight money to come to Ireland to visit me.
“I was taken in by it all and ended up giving him a large sum of money towards flight costs because he said he was having problems. I didn’t do a lot of internet searches on him and why he would be asking for money.
“It was only after when I did a search on Chris Martin, after I got scammed, that he had 150 million in wealth and that he had a girlfriend. I said to him at one point ‘You have a girlfriend’ and he said ‘No, that’s fake, it’s all for showbiz’.
“He sent me images of the real Chris Martin, direct headshots looking at the camera, images of orphans he said he was looking after.” The woman believes the fraudster used AI to manipulate videos on Skype to make them appear as if Chris Martin was speaking to her and waving at her.
For four months, he would contact her from 7am to midnight wooing her and asking her for pictures of herself. He then moved the conversation to money, requesting sums ranging from £150 to £400 to assist an orphanage Chris Martin had set up.
Then he claimed they needed £2,200 for flights to Ireland to visit. The impersonator next claimed he needed a loan of €22,000, saying he could not access funds during the pandemic.
Sinead, aged in her 40s, continued: “I think he asked for his orphans, that he was looking for a donation towards them. It was just a picture of children in a room.”
The scammer gave a woman’s bank account and proceeded to give other women’s details in the UK and the US for the rest of the sums. Excuses included that his accounts were frozen due to suspended tours, a film project and more. In total, Sinead gave him €25,000. She was so taken in, she got a solicitor to draw up documents stating that the money was a loan.
She took the money from her pension pot and it represented five years worth of savings. Sinead eventually confessed to her brother, who told her it was a scammer and contacted Coldplay’s management to prove it to her.
The victim said she was so embarrassed she did not want to talk to anybody about it. Even when she confronted the scammer, he insisted he was Chris Martin and asked her for another €20,000 before breaking contact.
After Sinead made a complaint, gardai, the PSNI, British police and US authorities became involved. Police in Minnesota tracked down and interviewed the female holder of a bank account there, but prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence to charge her.
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