There are people sitting in office cubicles in a warehouse in the Nigerian capital of Lagos right now sweet-talking Irish people with the intention of stealing their hearts. And their money.
The malicious romancing is not just happening in Lagos and there are other warehouses, office buildings and non-descript suburban houses all over the world – including in Ireland – where criminals are reading from scripts written by malevolent Cyrano de Bergerac and using images of postcard pretty people downloaded from the internet to woo the innocent before ripping them off and breaking their hearts.
Since the start of the pandemic almost two years ago, romance fraud has ramped up all over the world with Ireland as vulnerable to the menace as anywhere else. According to Garda figures, incidences of the crime jumped by 150 per cent in 2020 with a similar spike recorded in 2021.
To put such percentages into context: in 2019 about €400,000 was lost by lovesick Irish people. With the country in lockdown for much of 2020 and people isolated and more lonely than before, that figure jumped to more than €1 million.
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