Featured Image Credit: Channel 4/Sussex Police
Topics: Channel 4, Crime, UK News, Sex and Relationships
Joe Harker
Topics: Channel 4, Crime, UK News, Sex and Relationships
A woman who ended up in around £30,000 worth of debt after being targeted by a romance scam explained how her husband-to-be reacted when she started picking apart his story.
Megan Clarke was swept off her feet while working in a bar on the Isle of Wight in 2017 by a handsome stranger who very quickly made his interest in her clear.
Flowers started appearing at her workplace and she was showered with expensive gifts from a man she knew as 'Lord Bertie Underwood', who claimed to be a descendant of the inventor of the Underwood typewriter.
Within a month she'd moved into his home, which had pictures of the typewriter up around the place, and a few months later as they spent their first Christmas together he popped the question.
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Just a couple of months before she was set to walk down the aisle, Megan's apparent fairy tale romance started falling apart.
Letters that weren't addressed to either Megan or 'Lord Bertie' started being delivered to their home, and when she asked who these people were he brushed it off by claiming they were likely previous occupants.
However, her suspicions were aroused and she wisely decided not to leave it there, leading her to uncover multiple bank cards registered under different names.
When she brought it up with her future husband, she explained on the Channel 4 show Love Cheats that he 'changed instantly' in reaction to her questioning.
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She said: "I did ask Bertie about these cards and his attitude changed instantly.
"He shut it down quite quickly and got very defensive and irate. My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty.
"It's definitely when I started questioning everything."
His reaction convinced her that something was up and Megan started Googling the names of the people this post for supposed previous occupants was meant for, finding multiple news articles about him pulling cons.
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Even worse, letters started to arrive about credit card debt and loans taken out in Megan's name.
The man she was going to marry told her he really did love her and never meant for things to get so far, but after that she hasn't seen him in person.
She went to the police, but many of the transactions were put down to domestic issues due to the relationship between them and she was stuck having to try and pay off thousands in debt herself.
Hoping that she could alert others to this scammer, she posted his picture online and explained what had happened to her, with the post going viral and Megan being inundated with people sharing their own experiences.
She had 'multiple men contact me' and say that 'Bertie', real name Robert Madejski, had been sleeping with them.
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Though sentenced to five years in prison on other charges of fraud in 2022, Madejski escaped and has been on the run since then.