My Online Nightmare

This episode tells three extraordinary stories of women targeted by con artists and defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Single mum Annie Ruddock met Matthew Samuels through an online dating site in January 2013. He not only conned Annie out of most of her £80,000 inheritance, but left four other women and a man bereft of £180,000 over three years and fathered ten children. Joe and Keith Barnett were cruelly conned out of thousands of pounds when surrogate Louise Pollard dashed their hopes of having a child, turning out to be a duplicitous, cunning, and a manipulative fraud. And university professor Judith fell in love with totally fictitious John, who fooled her into handing over £140,000. She became the victim of a sophisticated online fraud which has left her not only emotionally devastated but with a very uncertain financial future.