A pension was conned out of £115,000 by a scammer who posed as the Deep Purple singer Ritchie Blackmore.
The 80-year-old woman couldn’t believe it when her former classmate and lead guitarist of the 70s rock band reached out to her online.
And what she thought was too good to be true ended up being exactly that.
Her daughter, Debbie Horwood, said it was an ’emotionaly rollercoaster’ as she lost her inheritance to fraudsters.
Debbie told ITV: ‘The amount of money she spent on daily basis was just insane.’
She added: ‘All things considerate, my mum is doing really well. She has a lot of support and help from the NHS and friends and family,’ she added, revealing how she found out about the scam.’
Debbie said her mum reached out to one of her brother’s friends to borrow some money, which was an ‘instant red flag.’
There are a number of variations of the gift card scam.
Fraudsters trick their victims into purchasing gift cards and then sending them the codes.
These scams typically involve perpetrators posing as legitimate entities, such as government agencies, financial institutions, tech support services, or businesses, to manipulate people.
Once the victim provides the gift card codes, the funds are quickly drained, and it becomes nearly impossible to trace or recover them.
Gift cards are favored by scammers because they offer a convenient and anonymous way to transfer funds quickly, rather than using banks.
The friend then told her brother, and when Debbie and him confronted their mum, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she said she was helping a friend with a ‘business transaction.’
Debbie’s mum told her children it was ‘an old friend’, who she said was called ‘Ritchie Blackmore’, but this all did not make sense to them.
It transpired that her mum had posted online about cycling to school in Heston with the musician when they were children.
A fraudster made an account with that name and used the guitarist’s picture before contacting her, later ordering her not to tell her family because of his ‘public profile’.
They persuaded their victim to purchase gift cards from supermarkets and then send them the codes, with the cash on them becoming ‘virtually untraceable’.
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