‘My mother was tricked by a fraudster pretending to be David Attenborough and gave them half of her life savings’
Whow are you? I don’t recognize you as my mother.”
Diane’s son Jim* broke into her house one Sunday morning. She had just discovered she had been in a six-month relationship with a fraudster claiming to be Sir David Attenborough.
“You were ready to abandon me!” he shouted.
Jim had just discovered that 74-year-old widow Diane had sent the scammer nearly half of her life savings in the belief that she was supporting the 99-year-old publisher through health and legal troubles.
After meeting her through a fake celebrity page on Facebook, she was preparing to sell her flat and send the money to a man she was convinced was her partner, who had hinted at marriage and encouraged her to leave her home in Canada and join him in London.
Diane and her son shared their story Independentsheds light on the ruthless psychological tactics of a growing criminal syndicate and leads this article to reveal shocking flaws in user protection on the world’s largest social media site.
In October 2024, the scammer behind the fake Attenborough Facebook profile reached out to Diane. Diane soon suggested they switch to Telegram, where their messages would be safer.
Their communication was intense. Diane was staying up very late every night to text her new lover, who claimed to be on UK time. Soon they were saying, “I love you.”
Have you been affected by fraud on social media? Share your story on: liam.james@independence.co.uk
After texting him every day for a few weeks, he said he was struggling financially because his ex-wife had taken hundreds of thousands of pounds from him.
Two weeks later, the scammer said he needed to help Diane pay a lawyer to collect money from his wife for life-saving kidney treatment.
Diane sent 4,000 Canadian dollars. Requests for cash kept coming. “There were always new excuses,” he says.
He was sending money from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars at a time. The scammer asked for payment to be made by depositing cash into a cryptocurrency account; This made it difficult to trace the money and tragically destroyed Diane’s hope of getting it back.
By March, Diane had sent CA$22,000 (£12,000), about half the money she had saved in her life, leaving her with just $6,000 in an account she could access.
He had doubts from the beginning about the identity of his new partner. “All this time, a voice inside me was saying, ‘Diane cut it off. She’s scamming you.’ But I was in love with her.”
He suggested they get married and promised them a wonderful life together in the UK after he sold his flat and gave her the money.
With this plan in mind, Diane obtained a passport.
But her suspicions were growing and she began asking for more evidence of the fraudster’s identity. Finally, he sent a pre-recorded video featuring an AI-generated image of Attenborough, complete with sound.
He remained suspicious and withdrew the remaining money from the cryptocurrency account he had deposited. But days later she was contacted again by the scammer, who had created a new Facebook profile to “prove” he was really Attenborough, and they returned to exchanging messages.
Diane’s son Jim found out what was happening and confronted her. This prompted Diane to break away from her relationship with the fraudster and reveal the psychological trauma she experienced.
Ten days after Jim’s intervention, the scammer emailed Diane. Still acting like Attenborough, he wrote: “You never deserved me. You acted like you loved me when you never did. You’re such a fool for giving me this pain in my heart.”
By this time, Diane knew she was being scammed, but she still had deep feelings for the scammer. Unfortunately, all he needed to pull him back was a flash. About six weeks after the email, she emptied her savings account and sent all the money to the scammer.
Jim said he and his mother have since opened a joint bank account to keep track of his money coming in and out, and he has sought help from a family doctor.
Diane is the victim of a romance scam; a ruthless form of fraud that digs deep into the victim’s psyche and turns them into a reliable source of money.
Experts said scammers use tactics similar to domestic abusers to isolate their victims and make them feel responsible for their so-called partners’ well-being. Research by UK Finance has found that romance scams often involve larger payments than other types of fraud, reflecting the enduring relationships scammers build with their victims.
Romance scams have increased significantly in recent years. UK Finance found £20.5 million was lost to romance scams in the first six months of last year; This figure increased by more than a third compared to the same period in 2024. Since 2020, the amount lost each year has almost doubled.
Social media has become the biggest hunting ground for scammers. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau last year found that the number of approaches to romance fraud was increasing via social media and messaging apps such as Telegram, and analysis of TSB data found that more than half (58 per cent) of all romance fraud cases started on social media and 29 per cent involved celebrity impersonation.
Facebook is full of fake celebrity accounts, accounting for 30 percent of all cases.
Diane followed two pages pretending to be Attenborough and openly asked fans to private message them. Each had been active for several months.
Independent The company, which reported both pages to Facebook, refused to remove them both, saying it focused on “the most serious cases with the potential for real-world harm.” Independent He continued to communicate with both pages. They both responded by pretending to be Attenborough.
One of these kept a reporter busy with an attempted romance scam that followed many of the steps reported by Diane and culminated six weeks later with the scammer demanding £2,000 via Bitcoin.
Searches for other celebrities turned up several fake pages with each name added. Some were easier to refute (a fake page claiming to be actor Ryan Reynolds used photos of Reynolds and Brad Pitt interchangeably) and attracted no followers. Meanwhile, others had tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers.
Facebook says it actively detects and removes fake content. The site includes a tool for users to report suspicious material.
If the real person has an official Facebook account or page, users can report a page pretending to be a celebrity. When Independent When it flagged some such pages they were mostly removed, but pages pretending to be celebrities without an official Facebook presence could not be reported in this way. However, such pages can be reported as they show signs of fraud.
Independent reported 100 fake celebrity pages showing clear signs of attempted fraud. Each page had at least 1,000 followers (the largest had 206,000) and was recently active.
Facebook said 91 out of 100 pages did not violate its content policy and would not be removed. It declined to review two of these and did not respond to reports about the other two. Five were removed. It was not clear what differentiated them from the others.
Most of these pages disappeared over the next six months, but only Independent that the remaining pages were finally removed.
Many of those who remained active during this time continued to increase their follower count: One account pretending to be Denzel Washington gained more than 100,000 followers and was still posting several times a day. Afterwards Independent He flagged the accounts directly to Meta’s press office, where all but one were removed.
The UK’s Online Safety Act requires tech companies to take action against illegal activity on their platforms. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it uses automated systems to detect and remove fake celebrity accounts.
Simon Miller, of Cifas, the UK’s largest not-for-profit fraud prevention service, said: “Social media and online platforms have enormous power to disrupt this national emergency by tightening verification processes, cracking down on fake pages and actively protecting their users.”
Diane’s scammer had characteristics typical of international fraud rings. Fraudsters targeting English-speaking countries generally operate in West Africa and Southeast Asia, where growing networks of fraud gangs linked to other forms of organized crime have developed, anti-fraud agents said. Authorities have found that people committing these fraudulent acts are often victims of human trafficking.
The TSB found that older people are disproportionately affected by romance scams. 58 percent of all cases were people over the age of 55. The most defrauded age group was the 65-74 age group (23 percent), followed by the 55-64 age group (19 percent).
A spokesperson for Meta said: “Impersonating public figures is against our policies and we have removed and disabled pages shared with us.
“Fraudsters are ruthless and are constantly evolving their tactics to avoid detection, which is why we are constantly developing new ways to make it harder for fraudsters to fool others, including using facial recognition technology.”
Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
LoveSaid offers support to people affected by romance scams. You can contact them via post@lovesaid.org. Incidents of fraud can be reported to Action Fraud via its website or by calling 0300 123 2040. If you are in immediate danger, contact the police on 999.
