{"id":43161,"date":"2026-09-16T22:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T21:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43161"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:25:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T21:25:13","slug":"you-yours-romance-scam-dump-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/09\/16\/you-yours-romance-scam-dump-her","title":{"rendered":"You & Yours romance scam: dump her!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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All you’ll ever get from her …<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Last Monday on You and Yours<\/a> (at 43:42), the BBC’s consumer affairs programme broadcast at noon Monday to Wednesday (it used to be every weekday, but other programmes are now broadcast at noon on Thursday and Friday), there was an update from a woman featured in a programme two weeks ago<\/a> whose son, who is on the autistic spectrum, was entangled in a ‘relationship’ with a woman supposedly from South Africa that he knows from an online gaming platform and has only ever exchanged text-based messages with, who has refused to show him her face, claiming to be “very shy”. His mother asked him to get the girl’s mother to make a video call to her, but the ‘mother’ refused, using the same excuse. The feature had prompted a lot of responses, most of them saying that the relationship was a scam and could lead to him being held to ransom if he went to South Africa to meet her. The update was that he had cancelled the ticket to South Africa after the refusal to share the video call, but was still in the relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t hear the original programme so maybe they had some of the people from Scam Secrets, the half-hour programme on that subject that goes out Thursday noon (Shari Vahl, the presenter, also presented last Monday’s You & Yours), but they should have had someone on there saying that a ‘girlfriend’ refusing to show her face to someone who thinks he is her boyfriend, or even talk to him on the phone, is a major red flag for a scam. No real boyfriend or girlfriend would not want to hear your voice or see your face, or to let you hear and see theirs, after more than a few days. I did wonder if the person he was communicating with was even a woman, though I wonder if a man can really keep up the pretence of being a woman (and a woman in love, at that) for that long. Clearly he was communicating with fraudsters of some kind, and there is probably more than one person involved. The man is a graduate in a professional career, and it has been noted that romance fraudsters target “emotionally vulnerable” people<\/a>, including “lonely professionals”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just this week, a group of six Nigerians were extradited from South Africa<\/a> to the USA to face charges of wire fraud after defrauding more than 100 women in the US of more than $6million. The six were members of Black Axe, described as a “mafia-like” criminal gang “tied to human trafficking, internet fraud and murder”. This group targeted American women, but there could be groups targeting men also. As the ‘girlfriend’ had not shown her face, a possibility occurred to me that the trip to South Africa could lead to some variant on the old “419 scam”, where there is some goal (such as a large sum of money) and a whole lot of things needing to be done to achieve it, all of which cost money — so-called advance fees. So, he could meet ‘friends’ or ‘family’ of the ‘girlfriend’ who need his ‘help’ to arrange the meeting somehow, and there will be one obstacle after another only soluble with a wad of cash until he realises there is no girlfriend and they just wanted his money. A South African news report<\/a> from 2022 mentions that Nigerian-based romance scams were “also known as 419 scams”. I was also told a story of a man who formed a relationship with a woman in Mozambique and went out to live with her and her family. She and the family produced one reason or another to spend his money, and when it ran out, she was no longer interested in him and kicked him out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, in the age of the internet, people do form relationships with people in other countries, including poorer countries than ours, but this attracts people with ulterior motives, including those seeking visas to western countries and money. Someone simply refusing to show their face after weeks or months and expecting you to travel to their country for that is not genuine; nobody who loves someone would let a relationship develop without letting them see their face. Only a conman, or group of them, would do that. If you are in this situation, end the relationship and dump these gold-diggers immediately. There are probably more than one of them and you are not the only person they have on the go. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Monday on You and Yours (at 43:42), the BBC’s consumer affairs programme broadcast at noon Monday to Wednesday (it used to be every weekday, but other programmes are now broadcast at noon on...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- You & Yours romance scam: dump her! (On a BBC story about a man who didn't know he was being scammed.)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[902,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-online-culture","category-scams"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-be9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/long-distance-love.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43163,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43161\/revisions\/43163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}