A SINGLE mum has issued a warning to other women after falling victim to a con artist posing as a US soldier. Julie Price sold her car, TV and her grandmother’s ring over the course of 12 months to raise money to send to her lover overseas. The 35-year-old said she’d recently come out of […]
A SINGLE mum has issued a warning to other women after falling victim to a con artist posing as a US soldier.
Julie Price sold her car, TV and her grandmother’s ring over the course of 12 months to raise money to send to her lover overseas.
The 35-year-old said she’d recently come out of a long-term relationship and was grieving the loss of her father, so was ‘vulnerable’ when the scammer pounced.
She said: “I’m ashamed of it now but I was completely in love with a stranger,” Daily Star reported.
In total she was conned out of £5,000, after sending money for gift cards and flights to the UK so her beau could meet her.
Before realising she’d been tricked, Julie, from Portsmouth, spent a year chatting with the fraudster on WhatsApp, who was using images of real-life soldier, Jonathan Ramos.
The conman, who called himself Jonathan, told Julie he was stationed at a military base in Afghanistan, and claimed he needed cash for Amazon and iTunes gift cards so he could access the internet.
Julie thought the man she’d fallen in love with, who she met on New Year’s Eve in 2018, was bravely fighting for his country.
He quickly told the mum-of-two, whose kids are 11 and four, that he loved her, and she sent him £1,000 so she could fly to the UK to meet her.
Julie sold her Ford Focus for £400 and pieces of jewellery, including her grandmother’s ring, to raise the cash.
But when she went to the airport to meet him in 2019, he was a no-show.
Julie said: “He didn’t text until the next day, claiming his commander stopped him. He then said he would need more money to come over and I fell for it.”
Finally in October that year she confided in her mum, Mary, who told her she’d fallen victim to a scam.
Julie said she started ‘crying her eyes out’ after realising she had been duped, and she started doing some research online.
To her horror she came across a Facebook group warning women about scammers using Jonathan Ramos’ photos, as well as a video from the solider himself explaining photos had been taken from his Instagram account.
Julie confronted the scammer, and spoke to him on the phone, saying: “I could tell he was putting on an American accent and he was African. He just hung up.”
She said she was sharing her story so other women wouldn’t be so easily fooled by online conmen, adding she only thought ‘older women’ fell into these traps.
“I’m 35 and walked straight into it,” she added.
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