Best of 2025: Romance fraud: the cost of loving
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Romance fraud is at an all time high, low-hanging fruit in the growing world of online scams. But what are the methods? Who falls for it? And are there ways we can all avoid it?
This episode was first published in April.
This podcast was brought to you thanks to the support of readers of The Times and The Sunday Times. Subscribe today: http://thetimes.com/thestory
Guests:
- Mary Chater, romance fraud victim
- Alexis Conran, TV and radio presenter
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Edith Rousselot.
Further reading: The Times's Crime and Justice Commission - The justice system is in crisis. We spent a year finding solutions
Clips: The Real Hustle Youtube channel, Still Watching Netflix Youtube channel.
Photo: Getty Images.
Get in touch: thestory@thetimes.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Luke from The Story. You probably can't move from all the festive overindulging |
| 0:05.6 | you've been enjoying. I know the story team certainly have. So I am minding the podcast fort |
| 0:10.8 | with some of our 2025 favourites to keep you going over the Christmas period and distract you |
| 0:16.9 | from returning to the fridge. Enjoy. |
| 0:21.1 | From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:31.8 | I've dealt with victims of scans, hundreds of them. I've been doing this for a couple of decades now. |
| 0:39.5 | And romance scams are the ones that always leave me broken at the end of an interview. |
| 0:46.7 | Online fraud is on the rise. 6.6 million of us lost money to one last year. |
| 0:52.7 | But it's the ones that tug on your heartstrings, which prey on loneliness, that seem the most vicious. |
| 0:59.3 | They really destroy the fabric of your humanity. |
| 1:03.9 | So one of the last ones was a lady called Ava. |
| 1:07.4 | She lost about £67,000. |
| 1:14.5 | It was all the money she had after her husband had passed away. |
| 1:22.4 | And she was a really intelligent woman. She had a bubbly, lovely personality. She had family. |
| 1:29.1 | But she was lonely. We went to visit her and it was a lovely house, but it was an empty house. She had no one to talk to. And as entertaining as daytime TV can be, people need company. People need |
| 1:37.3 | someone to talk to. People need human contact. And she broke my heart because the reason really that she fell for this romance scam was because |
| 1:48.4 | she was lonely. |
| 1:49.8 | And when I saw those messages, I thought to myself, do you know what? |
| 1:54.5 | In her shoes, I would have properly fallen for that scam. |
| 2:05.3 | Okay. fallen for that scam. And we know that many unfortunately do. |
| 2:08.5 | But how do these scams actually work? |
| 2:10.6 | And how can you protect yourself against them? |
... |
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