Mother-of-three conned out of £80,000 by swindlers posing as US soldier

Mother-of-three Kate Roberts has told how she was tricked out of £80,000 by a fraudster posing as a lonely US soldier on the Friends Reunited website. Ms Roberts lost her house in the scam, just ten months after she ‘fell in love’ with Sgt Mark Ray Smith. ‘Aside from losing the money, I feel like I’ve lost the love of my life,’ said the divorcée. ‘I know he wasn’t real but the feelings were real to me and that’s very difficult to come to terms with.’ She now wants to warn others falling for what the US embassy warned was an ‘increasingly common’ type of fraud.

Ms Roberts was sucked in after clicking on the ‘find someone perfect for you’ area of Friends Reunited in October 2009. She found a man claiming to be a 43-year-old widower serving in Iraq who had an 11-year-old daughter. They exchanged emails and started chatting several times a day on MSN. He even began calling after she gave him £225 for a phone line. The scammers posted pictures of a soldier in uniform and bare-chested. They even used a picture of a little girl to represent the daughter.


Photo from SWNS.

‘What I am most worried about is that I emailed him pictures of myself and my children,’ Ms Roberts, 47, she said. ‘I have no idea if those pictures are now being used by the gang to con other people out of money.’ The fake sergeant then begged the administrator from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, for money to buy himself leave from the army, backed up by receipts on forged US military headed paper. He then wanted to buy his way out of the army for good. Between October 2009 and July last year, Ms Roberts wired him £80,000 either via Western Union or direct to his bank account.

But she found it was a scam when all contact stopped after she arranged for £12,000 to be sent to a friend of Sgt Smith’s to pay for his flight to Britain. Her phone company traced his number to a mobile phone in Nigeria. She then alerted police. ‘When the officers told me I was the victim of a highly organised scam my world fell apart,’ said Ms Roberts. The US embassy is trying to identify the soldier in the pictures.

And in a separate case, paraplegic woman Valerie Cooke from Plymouth, was forced to sell her bungalow after being conned out of tens of thousands of pounds by a man who claimed to be an American serviceman stationed in Afghanistan. Video.