Associated Incidents
A RETIRED lecturer has told how she was scammed out of £17,000 by a 'deepfake' girlfriend she met online.
Nikki MacLeod, 77, from Edinburgh, lost the huge sum of money to a romance scammer who used AI-generated videos to send convincing messages.
Nikki, who is an expert in neuroscience, had been chatting online to a woman she believed to be called Alla Morgan.
After meeting on Facebook, the pair struck up a conversation and began what she believed was a close online relationship, exchanging thousands of messages.
Having already spoken to someone using the name Alla Morgan, she had her suspicions when a user with the same name appeared on her page.
But after spending "millions of words" talking to her, Nikki began to receive videos from the scammer and was "completely convinced" by the AI-generated messages.
The scammer created an elaborate backstory as an offshore oil worker.
And they managed to dupe Nikki out of a total of £17,000 using the sophisticated ruse.
Speaking to GMB on Tuesday, she said: "I was talking to one person who was called Alla Morgan.
"She was working on an oil rig in the Aegean Sea.
"Then this particular person disappeared, and then miraculously in my Facebook feed, another Alla Morgan appeared.
"I was very curious and I started asking questions.
"My suspicions were already raised but we got on so well - she was a brilliant conversationalist, I've spent millions of words talking to her."
She added: "Eventually she sent me these videos to convince me she was real - and I was completely convinced and fell even more in love with her."
After chatting for a while, the scammer told Nikki that they were going to come and visit her in Scotland.
They began the ruse by telling her they needed £2,500 for a helicopter flight into Edinburgh Airport.
After being sent a series of fake documents from fake company 'SBM Offshore', Nikki was so convinced that she sent the money under the illusion she would receive it back.
Shortly after, she received another message from the scammer asking for £12,000 to cover the costs of her new partner's trip to Scotland, which is where she drew the line.
Nikki's scam ordeal deepened further once the pair began talking about her daughter who had recently split up with her husband and was house hunting in Aberdeen.
In order to help her out, the scammer offered to lend the 77-year-old £65,000 to pay for the home, allowing her access to a fake bank account.
After taking the money out of the account, her account was frozen and funds began to leave her own account.
But still, the scammer told her not to worry as the cash would be returned to her as she had £1.5million saved, which Nikki could see in the fraudulent account.
Revealing her heartbreaking agony at the hands of the scammer, Nikki told GMB's Susanna Reid and Ed Balls: "I'm sure the person behind it is almost certainly not a woman and is probably a man somewhere in the world, who knows where they are.
"The images I've tried to find myself using reverse image scanning and I can't find her, so she's obviously being exploited as much as I am."
Asked how she was duped by the scam, Nikki added: "I guess I was getting pretty lonely. I'd had a whole series of upsets. I lost my partner, I lost my parents and my partner left with our two children in the middle of lockdown, so I guess I was getting pretty lonely."