Dead at First Sight, page 8
‘As a lot of single people do,’ Jack encouraged.
‘Absolutely. Next thing, she told me she’d met someone. At first I was delighted – I thought he was probably a retired professional, someone like Dad, until one day I went round to the house and saw a picture of this – er – fellow – on her computer screen. A very good-looking man, younger than my mum, whose name, she told me, was Richie Griffiths.’
‘Richie Griffiths?’
‘Yes. I discovered that what she’d done was put up a photo of me, because the earlier ones of her looked out of date – we looked very similar when she was my age. I told her that the moment they met, he was going to realize she had lied.’
‘How did she respond?’
‘She got angry with me and told me I was being ageist. That what did an age gap matter? She said she’d read about a sixty-nine-year-old man in Holland who’d gone to court saying his doctor had told him he had the body of a forty-nine-year-old, so that’s what he wanted to change his age to. He argued that if you could change your name or your sex, then you could change your age – he wanted to be twenty years younger to help his chances of getting a job. Mum said that when they met she knew Richie would forgive her little white lie. She said they were madly in love and that she slept with his photo under her pillow.’
‘OK, so then what happened?’ Jack prompted.
‘Well, I help out with her paperwork – I go over there every week. A couple of months or so ago I opened a bank statement and saw a whole bunch of payments to an account in Munich. Small at first – £250. Then £500. Then £800. Then £2,000. I asked her about them. My mother told me that Richie Griffiths was a film-maker, originally from England, and married to a German actress in Munich. They’d recently split up and were going through an acrimonious divorce, and he’d had his bank account frozen by a German lawyer. He was strapped for cash and if she could help him out he would pay her back when he got his life sorted out. I wasn’t happy about this, obviously.’
‘It’s a familiar kind of pattern.’
‘Next time I visited her, I was alarmed to see a much bigger payment, £15,000. This man had told her his sister had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and needed immediate treatment. He was in despair and could she lend him the money to pay for her treatment until he got his affairs sorted out? Then yesterday morning I went over to her and she told me he’d offered her a great investment. His marital home, in the best area of Munich, was worth a lot more than his ex-wife was claiming from him. If my mother loaned him the money to buy out his wife’s share of their home, they would both make a killing when he sold it.’
‘How much is the loan he’s asking for?’
‘In the region of £450,000.’
Roberts whistled. ‘Does she have that amount in cash available?’
‘She has, invested. Luckily it’s going to take a while for her to get all the money because much of it is in bonds. I’ve told her she needs to get her solicitor to make sure it’s all done correctly with this fellow – hoping any lawyer would realize pretty quickly it’s a con. I’ve spoken to her bank manager. She was sympathetic but said she was powerless to stop her. But she said she would speak to her to try to dissuade her. What is even more alarming is that the manager told me, in confidence, that my mother had enquired about remortgaging her house. When she told Mother that she was unlikely to get a mortgage due to her lack of income, my mother said she had been looking into equity-release plans. So this Richie – whoever he might be – is clearly not going to stop at £450,000. That’s when I decided I needed urgent help and found you, on the internet. You seem to be specializing in this kind of fraud – if that’s what this is.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Jack Roberts reassured her. ‘When I got your message, via my secretary, I did some background checks on this “Richie Griffiths” and found out he’s a pretty busy guy out on the internet. At least half-a-dozen different ladies are all in love with him – and several of them in the process of helping him buy his ex-wife out of their property.’ He grimaced. ‘Not bad for someone who doesn’t actually exist.’
23
Friday 28 September
Matt Sorokin sat on a huge sofa in his hotel suite, feeling small and lost. He stared, blankly, at the ghost of himself in the window that stared back at him, and at the darkness of the night and ocean beyond. Darkness that felt like it was leaking in through the glass and seeping deep into every vein and pore of his body.
His brain was wired. His stomach felt hollowed out. Four a.m.
He was a long way from sleep. A long way from anything, oh God, from what this night should have been.
He reached over and grabbed his wallet. Flipped it open and stared at the photograph. Evelyne’s beautiful face, with her big, trusting eyes, the laughter creases around her mouth, her long, silky dark hair. Half his age. Punching above his weight, a couple of buddies back at the Sheriff’s office had ribbed him. But they were just jealous – any guy would be when they saw that picture. And there were plenty, way more sexy photographs that she’d sent him on their private Facebook link. Some wickedly so indeed, driving him wild with anticipation!
This was to have been the night of his dreams. Sweeping into his arms the woman of his dreams.
Instead he sat alone in the wreckage of a train crash. Surrounded by vases of flowers. Big, vibrantly coloured and insanely expensive flowers. Thinking what a close call he’d had to giving her more money. She’d tried to get him to lend her over half a million bucks, ostensibly to buy out her husband’s share of their house in São Paulo. But it still hurt to lose ninety thousand bucks. What his NYPD pal Pat Lanigan called his fun money.
Money he’d put aside to help his brother, who was unable to walk because of a muscle-wasting disease, to make his home more wheelchair friendly. Money he was going to use to help his granddaughter rent premises for her new fashion business. And the rest he’d been going to spend enjoying life with Evelyne.
Gone.
Evelyne and the money? Not possible.
He looked at his phone, as he did every few minutes. In the forlorn, fading hope that . . . That . . .?
He was too gutted to open the champagne in the fridge – and toast what? Instead he was drinking his way steadily through the contents of the minibar. The bourbons. Then the Scotch. The gin. And now he was on the vodka.
On the screen of his laptop beside him was the real estate agent’s brochure of the white, colonial-looking house. Evelyne Desota’s home. He had nearly taken out a mortgage to help her buy out her husband’s share.
Except, from an exhaustive trawl of the internet an hour or so back, it had become evident the real estate agency did not exist.
It was all an elaborate scam and he had been suckered in.
How?
How had he been such a fool?
At least he’d not been a complete idiot and given her all the money. But even so, he felt a raw, ulcerous pain in his stomach. He was sixty-three. He’d had it all figured out. Maybe twenty years of active life left if he was lucky and, boy, had he been planning to make each one of those years count – even more so in the five months since beautiful Evelyne Desota had responded to his advert on findMefindYou.net.
He’d learned very early on in his career as a cop never to trust anyone and to check every story. How had he allowed himself to blindly believe Evelyne? To send her money without even a signed piece of paper between them?
Because he had trusted her – or maybe it was his dick that had trusted her. All those Facebook messages. Texts all day long and late into the night, telling him how much she loved him. The long and often very intense phone conversations. Ever since she had come into his life he’d been fired with a zest he never knew was in him.
The woman he was certain he would cherish to the ends of the earth. In his dreams.
Where was she now? Who was she?
He’d done a reverse Google search on her. The one he should have done the moment he’d first seen her, when he’d have found out right away she wasn’t a restaurant manager at all. Her image was on the website of a Brazilian escort agency, under a different name. He recognized her from the erotic pose; the exact same photograph she had sent him a while back.
He’d found her five more times, under five more different names, on other dating websites.
His eyes were watering with tiredness, with sadness, with anger. Anger at himself.
You dumb asshole.
24
Friday 28 September
‘That’s him,’ Elizabeth Foster said, peering over Jack Roberts’s shoulder at the screen on his desk. At the face of a handsome, amiable-looking man with short silver hair. He was smartly dressed in a suit jacket, shirt and tie.
His profile gave him as a Munich-based film producer, formerly from England.
‘You’re sure, Liz?’
‘Positive.’
‘I looked him up on the IMDb – the internet movie database which lists everyone in the world in the movie business,’ Roberts said. ‘The only Richard Griffiths listed is the chubby actor best known for his role in the Harry Potter films – who died in 2013.
‘Take a look at this,’ he continued. He tapped his keyboard and another image of Toby Seward appeared, this time in military uniform. His profile gave him as Colonel Rob Cohen, aged forty-seven.
Elizabeth Foster narrowed her eyes.
‘Same fellow?’ Jack Roberts asked.
‘I think so. Yes.’
He tapped the keys again and another image of the same man appeared, this time in a British Airways pilot’s uniform, complete with cap. This profile was of a Peter Olins, fifty-one, airline captain.
Roberts looked over his shoulder. ‘Want to see any more of this busy chap? He has plenty of other different personas.’
‘How?’
‘Photoshop?’ He shrugged.
‘Can you give me the links – maybe that will help convince Mother.’
‘Of course.’
‘So, who is the real identity? Which one of these?’
‘I’m guessing it’s Colonel Rob Cohen. But that’s just a hunch.’
‘And presumably he has no knowledge of this?’
‘I doubt it. When they target ladies, these scammers tend to pick military types because they look trustworthy. Look at him, he seems a regular guy, decent and upright.’
They went back over to the sofa and sat down again.
‘I want to get that money back for her, Mr Roberts. My mother’s not a wealthy woman – by today’s standards. When my father died he left her the house mortgage free and just under half a million pounds in cash and stocks and shares. It’s a nice house, a semi, close to Hove seafront, but it’s not a mansion. That money, combined with her state pension, would have enabled her to live comfortably – she’s never been an extravagant woman.’ She hesitated and smiled, nervously. ‘She’s pretty thrifty by nature. She’s always looked for a deal when she’s been food shopping, buying stuff at the end of its sell-by date and hunting down the cheapest supermarket offers. In the past few years she’s done most of her grocery shopping at Lidl, and she’s always proud of her bargains. Only a couple of months ago she phoned me, excitedly, to tell me about an amazing offer Lidl had on prawns. What she’s doing now is so out of character. I need to somehow convince her of what is really happening here. Can you help me do that?’
‘Liz, I’d love to tell you I could, but I don’t want you throwing good money after bad.’
‘I don’t care what it costs, Mr Roberts. My husband’s a very successful businessman, with deep pockets. He’s as angry as I am. I’ve come to you because I’ve been told you are the best in this field. Don and I don’t care what it costs or what it takes, I want to find the bastard – or bastards – behind this and teach them a lesson they will never forget.’
He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I like your spirit, Liz. And I never like to turn down business or a challenge. But before my charge clock starts ticking you need to be aware just how slim the chances of success are. Most of the masterminds behind these scams operate from jurisdictions that aren’t easy for our police forces to get any help from. Ghana, Nigeria and Eastern Europe are the three most common ones. They hide behind firewalls in the dark web. Any money that’s sent to them is either spent almost right away or placed in accounts in countries – admittedly getting fewer these days – that aren’t willing to hand over information to police authorities.’
‘So a shitty little conman in one of these countries can screw my mother – and anyone else in the Western world – out of every penny, and none of our law-enforcement agencies can do a damned thing about it? Is that what you are saying?’
‘Not for want of trying, but in a nutshell, yes.’
‘Well, I’m going to do something about it. Are you in or out?’
Roberts looked back at her confidently. ‘I’m in.’
25
Monday 1 October
DS Sally Medlock looked around the room at the members of the recently formed Financial Crimes Safeguarding Team. It had been her initiative to set it up, with the enthusiastic support of the Chief Constable and Police and Crime Commissioner, to take new approaches in guarding the vulnerable – and sometimes just plain gullible – against the myriad predators lurking out there in the digital sewers.
In 2005 romance fraud accounted for just seven per cent of all financial scams perpetrated in the UK. Today it was close to eighty per cent. Sums varied from a few thousand pounds up to a staggering four and a half million. And romance fraud was just one area of the growing menace of financial crime.
The situation had become so serious they now had a daily management meeting, Monday to Friday. Seven officers, a mixture of detectives and uniform, sat around the table in the first-floor conference room at Police Headquarters in Lewes. They were housed, along with Major Crime, in one of the former dormitory buildings at the rear of the HQ campus, directly above Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s office.
‘Safeguarding’ was a vital but largely unseen duty carried out by British police forces. Monitoring and protecting people who were suffering domestic abuse. Children who were victims of sexual abuse. Young people from overseas, mostly Nigeria, Romania and Albania, who were brought over as slaves and forced into being sex workers or working in other jobs for a pittance. And more recently people who were under observation as victims of internet fraud – many of whom were elderly.
A wide number of both men and women of all ages, but mostly over forty, were currently being targeted by perpetrators of romance fraud. This new, specialist unit, expensive to run, was performing a crucial service, carrying out safeguarding assessments, along with social workers, and working with financial institutions to identify victims – and potential victims – and work with them and their families to try to prevent them parting with their cash.
Many of the victims were elderly and vulnerable with mental health issues, such as dementia and other age-related illnesses. Among the questions facing the team was whether targeted victims had the capacity to make informed decisions or were they just making unwise choices. Increasingly the police were being helped by the staff of money services bureaux, post offices and supermarket banks. There were protocols in place involving all high-street banks and post offices on reporting suspicious transactions. There were likely to be few good reasons, in this team’s view, for any elderly Sussex resident to be sending large sums of cash to Ghana or Nigeria.
The exponential growth of telephone and online fraud had resulted in a step change for the police. In the past, policing policy had been ‘let’s go after the offender’. But with romance fraud, in particular, mostly originating overseas, there were simply not the resources to send officers out to those countries. Too often police forces would have to close their files, marked ‘Undetected’. It was Sussex Police’s Operation Signature that had led the way forward.
The biggest task for the Safeguarding Team was to try to persuade individuals to take a step back and look at the evidence and reality of the situation. One recent such fraud had suckered in a staggering thirty-seven women around the globe – three of whom were in Sussex, their ages ranging from sixty-five to eighty-nine. It was easy for the fraudsters to give a plausible story. All of the women were in love with a hunk of a tattooed bike-fanatic US soldier, whom they thought was in love with them. It had been relatively easy to persuade the three Sussex victims simply by showing them the source photograph of the soldier.
One of the main reasons for victims not coming forward, the team knew, was embarrassment. Many of the victims were smart, professional or former professional people who were supposed to know what they were doing. It was hard for a worldly-wise person, who had handed over every penny they had, to admit this to friends and family. Just as it was equally hard for police officers to have to break the news to someone that their internet lover, who had spent a year rinsing them, did not actually exist.
Behind DS Medlock was a large monitor on which, in turn, examples of the latest sophisticated banking scams identified by the team’s researchers appeared. Emails purporting to be from the high-street bank HSBC warning the recipient their online account was being hacked and to immediately enter their password and change it, along with all other details. Another, similar, from Apple. And another, seemingly from their own Sussex Police Financial Crimes Unit, looking totally authentic, until two spelling errors were pointed out along with the bogus email address, carefully masked.
Next, the people currently on their radar appeared, with a few lines of background. As each one came on the screen, the DS asked her team for any updates.
After twenty minutes of going through the list, they reached the romance fraud category, and a photograph of a handsome, distinguished-looking silver-haired man in his late fifties appeared. His name, below the image, read Major John (Johnny) Fordwater. Financial Crimes Safeguarding Officer DC Helen Searle, a woman in her thirties, raised an arm on which were several chunky bracelets. ‘A bit of a sad story here, boss, I’m afraid. His name first came to our attention two months ago, during Intel’s surveillance of Sakawa Boy social media traffic from Ghana. I actually went to see Major Fordwater myself to try to convince him that he was the victim of fraudsters, but he was, frankly, very rude to me, and refused to believe me. Unfortunately, at that time, I didn’t have the photographic evidence that might have convinced him. So far as he was concerned he was very much in love with a German lady called Ingrid Ostermann, and we were mistaken. Subsequently he has been interviewed twice by DS Potting and DC Wilde, and I understand he has now been presented with the evidence and has accepted the situation – at least I hope he has. He’s paid out about £400,000.’
