A victim of a romance scam has spoken how she fell ‘hook, line and sinker’ after he winked at her during a pub quiz.
Andrew Camfield, 59, went on to fleece HR professional Louise and her family out of £70,000 after ‘stringing her along’ for three years.
After being driven to maxing out credit cards for the conman, she would later ask for money from her elderly parents, who lost their life savings, and her son, who blew his wedding fund bailing out the fraudster.
Camfield was finally caught when Louise’s son reported him to police.
Louise first met Camfield at a pub quiz in 2018, and recalls how the ‘funny’ and ‘intelligent’ conman winked at her on the evening.
She said: ‘I fell hook, line and sinker.’
We became more and more involved. Mirror reports.
‘He told me he loved me. I fell in love with him.’
She even recalls how her friends said he was ‘such a lovely chap’ – but the problems began when he claimed he was about to inherit some money, and was struggling with cash flow difficulties.
Saying he was waiting for a solicitor to arrange the transfer, Louise offered to help him out financially on the ‘cast iron promise that he would return the money to me as soon at it came through.’
‘It would be a matter of a week, two weeks max’, she said.
‘This then became something of a pattern. I know that now, but didn’t know it at the time.
‘There would be a problem, a bill that had to be paid, and he was still waiting for the money from the inheritance to come through.
‘And so I found myself, having done it once, I could do it again.
Despite previously having a good credit record, within just 12 months Louise had maxed out the credit limit, before she started to turn to members of her family to keep the money flowing to Camfield.
But the payments eventually stopped when she felt it had got ‘to a point where you can’t do any more’, and she eventually began to see the situation with clarity.
She reflected: ‘I’m an HR professional, I think I should know people, be able to understand if someone is lying to me or deceiving me.
‘I still can’t believe he was so clever at doing that, at convincing everybody he was someone he was not.
Camfield, of Eastbourne, Sussex, was sentenced to a total of seven years imprisonment for fraud by false representation at Hove Crown Court on Thursday May 25.
Despite the ordeal she and her family through, Louise says there is ‘a bit of me that still loves that person that I met and lived with, and shared my life with, my dreams with’.
But the incident has left her feeling more than just out of pocket, and she added: ‘I feel I’ve left my family down, I’ve left my friends down.
‘I feel very judgemental about what I’ve done. And I therefore start to think that others around me think that I’ve been naive, stupid, easily led.
‘I have to come to terms with beginning to trust people that I knew, that I meet in new situations, that I find difficult.
‘My confidence has taken a bash.’
