Associated Incidents
A series of deep-fake videos convinced Nikki MacLeod, 77, a former lecturer at Edinburgh University, to send gift cards and make bank and PayPal transfers to what she believed was a real woman with whom she was in an online relationship.
MacLeod, who describes herself as "a really intelligent person", was initially sceptical but felt reassured by video messages from the person, which she now knows were fake.
She said she and "Alla Morgan" planned to sail around the world together and buy a home in the Highlands.
Requests for money began with a couple of hundred pounds for gift cards to pay for the internet connection so that they could keep talking, and escalated to thousands of US dollars. In total MacLeod was duped out of £17,000.
She finally contacted police after being asked to transfer money from a fake bank account.
Taken in by scammers, my story by Nikki MacLeod
Talking to an artificial intelligence deepfake is just like talking to anybody. It looked and sounded like a woman and it was so utterly incredibly believable.
"Things only started to go pear shaped when all my money disappeared.
"Alla Morgan" said she was an oil rig worker
Previously I had always had normal relationships with people you could actually touch and hug.
I had a pretty good life, which I am grateful for, until my relationship ended in 2021 and I got duped by an AI deepfake this year. I was brought up in Hampshire and moved to Scotland around 40 years ago. I was an academic at Edinburgh University medical school, teaching physiology and biology to medical students as well as doing neuroscience research on brain diseases.
I was in a loving relationship for 25 years. I met my ex-partner online in 1995 on a now defunct lesbian chatroom called Euro-Sappho, which was just an email list in those days, and we hit it off.
We were joined in a civil partnership, we had a daughter in 2004, our son was born in 2007, and I retired around ten years ago. I then took up tennis coaching, as you do, for some crazy reason.
My partner and I drifted apart around the time my dad died in December 2018, although I wasn't aware there was an issue until it ended after the second coronavirus lockdown in 2021.
Pain of break-up
My mum had vascular dementia and my dad was her carer. She had to go into a care home when he died and I was up and down to Hampshire a lot after that to visit her even though she hardly knew who I was.
I got home one day and went to give my partner a hug and she told me without warning the relationship was over. She had already found a place to live but wasn't able to move during lockdown.
As soon as lockdown lifted she left with our kids and our dog Panda, a lovely little terrier from Cyprus. I haven't seen our children for over two years.
Being alone after 25 years together was bloody awful. Really miserable. It came like a bolt out of the blue. I was so down in the dumps and I didn't know what to do.
I took solace in music. I've played guitar since I was 12 and when my partner left I started learning the fiddle. I also distracted myself with knitting and making sourdough bread.
I wasn't suspicious enough
After a while I got tired of talking to my dog Rosa, a delightful golden crossbreed, so I started talking to people on the internet.
Maybe my guard was down and I wasn't being careful or suspicious enough. I had never heard of these internet scammers before so it just wasn't on my radar.
That's when I met "Alla Morgan" --- or should I say the first "Alla Morgan" --- on a Facebook lesbian chatroom earlier this year. "She" popped up on the chatroom and said: "Hi". As innocently as that. We chatted for a month or two and she sent me photos of her working on an oil rig but then she disappeared.
A little while later, at the end of July, a picture of another woman on an oil rig appeared on the chatroom and she was also called Alla Morgan.
I actually initiated the conversation and demanded to know who she was because there can't be two oil workers called Alla Morgan. She told me the person I had been speaking to was a fake and she was the real Alla Morgan.
Requests for money began
I should have run a mile but I fancied the woman in the pictures and she was such an engaging conversationalist.
We both seemed to like each other and we swapped pictures. I could never persuade them to call or Facetime me but then she started asking for money.
It began with requests for a couple of hundred pounds for Steam Cards, gift cards normally given to kids to buy computer games but she said it was to pay for the internet connection so we could keep chatting. I've since learned Steam Card fraud is a very widespread scam.
I'm using the pronoun "she" a lot but I suspect she is not a she at all but probably a man in another country.
Then she asked for $2,500 in US dollars to pay for a helicopter for her to come and visit me in Edinburgh, which I eventually did after a lot of grumpy to and fro.
It all seemed very official. I had to fill out very professional forms headed SBM Offshore, which had to be signed by me and her supervisor. The level of detail was incredible.
Then when I paid the $2,500 they wanted another $3,900 to "compensate the company for her being on vacation". I refused to have anything to do with that and said don't be ridiculous.
She obviously didn't come in the end and I never got that money back, but we kept on chatting and I told her my daughter was looking to buy a house in Aberdeen.
Then Alla offered to buy her a house. She told me she had $1.4 million in a bank account. She gave me the account number and password and told me to take the money to pay for the house.
It was a bank called TerraFin Capital, which has a very professional looking website but it's all fake. I put in the account number and lo-and-behold the balance was $1.4 million.
She told me to take the money for the house and also asked me to transfer $500,000 to a company in Italy for some parts for a machine she need to cut pipes on the rig.
So I did that as well and everything seemed to go fine but then the bank account was frozen. I got an email from the bank asking for $11,800 to unfreeze the bank account.
Alla told me to just pay the money and she would pay me back but when I made the payment they said it didn't go through. I got another email from the fake bank asking me to cancel that payment and pay them another way.
I felt so foolish as the truth dawned
When I called my bank back that was when I realised I had been scammed. They told me not to pay a single penny more but I had already done it and the money had been taken. They told me they see this kind of scam time and time again.
Altogether I had paid them around £17,000. I phoned the police and they said they will investigate but I'm not sure they will because it's not a lot of money compared to the hundreds of thousands other people have lost.
The bank managed to get £7,000 back but the rest went through various brokers on PayPal. I actually realised later that one of these "brokers" had the same email address as the "manager" at SBM Offshore so that was a huge mistake on their part and made it blatantly obvious it was a scam.
I felt like absolute shit. So foolish that a really intelligent person like me had been taken in. I had seen the warning signs, asked for verification, and even had one video call which wasn't very clear and I wasn't convinced by it.
Then I finally got a voice call but the voice was different. It sounded like an English woman rather than a transatlantic American with a Dutch accent which was how Alla normally sounded.
Even after they had been busted they still tried to contact me. Alla said she was flying into Edinburgh to see me but when the plane didn't arrive I got a message from her saying she had been arrested and put in prison in Turkey for stealing $1.5 million.
She sent me the contact details of her lawyer and asked for another $6,500 to get her out of jail.
When I refused she kept contacting me asking why I was "letting her die in jail" but of course wasn't in jail. I finally got them to admit that they were a scammer, which was something, so I asked for my money back but I've never received it.
I won't do that again, that's for sure, and I hope by telling my story I will deter other people from falling for it too.
Not only do they take all your money but they break your heart. You get so emotionally involved with these people.
We had a whole future planned, sailing round the world and buying a cottage in the Highlands, and it all just disappeared with my money.
Today I can't even afford to buy my daughter a lightbulb let alone a house.
I feel really stupid but I am glad to get it off my chest and tell the world that this shit happens so be very careful.