THE mighty Cher once said: “The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing – and then marry him.”
Or, in the case of David Checkley, “lend” him vast sums of money without realising he’s a serial con artist.
MET POLICE/UNPIXSDavid Checkley, 65, has just been jailed for the third time after cheating ten women out of a combined £111,000[/caption]
kate_konlin/InstgramAnd Simon Leviev, 33, was the subject of Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler[/caption]
Dubbed “The Man with the Golden Tongue”, 65-year-old Checkley has just been jailed for the third time after cheating ten women out of a combined £111,000.
One of them, 60-year-old Lise Johansen, lent him more than £15k in the space of three years and was left unable to pay her own bills.
She was left homeless, had to use food banks, became a recluse, says she’ll never trust another partner and feels her sons are ashamed of her.
Romance cons are now one of the fastest growing categories of fraud, but it wasn’t the police who caught Checkley, from St Albans in Hertfordshire. It was one of his victims.
Angela Montagna, 63, met him on the dating website Plenty of Fish and now knows he’s a ruthless shark.
But at first he seemed charming, explaining that he was a wealthy architect who travelled the world designing palaces for “kings and princes” and was once married to the heiress of the LG electronics empire.
They had been on three dates in London by the time he asked her to “take a leap of faith” and lend him £3,200.
When it wasn’t repaid and he asked for a further £400k, she became suspicious and started digging.
It didn’t take her long to untangle his almost 40 years of deceit, during which he is believed to have conned more than 60 women.
He was jailed in 2002 for five years for luring a man into a deal to buy fake Rolex watches, and in 2010 he was jailed for six years and ten months after admitting conning ten women out of £163,191.
Within weeks of leaving prison, Checkley had uploaded a dating profile and was searching for new women to charm with his fanciful tales of being a pilot in the US air force, serving in the Vietnam war (it ended when he was 17) and doing voluntary work at a women’s refuge.
As we now know, he succeeded all over again and is now starting a sentence of 11 years.
He is not alone in his heartless actions.
The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau received 8,036 reports of romance fraud in the past financial year, amounting to more than £92million. The average loss per victim was £11,500.
So what lessons can we learn from the actions of men like Checkley and 33-year-old Simon Leviev, the subject of Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler?
Remain vigilant
Well, in the latter’s case, it’s clear that global law still has some way to go in taking romance fraud seriously. It can ruin lives.
And in the case of Checkley, many of his largely middle-aged victims felt too embarrassed to go to the police, so it wasn’t until Angela Montagna alerted the authorities that he got caught.
The world can feel like a lonely place when you’re single, and wanting to find love with that special someone is understandable. And yes, baddies like Checkley are wholly to blame, not their victims.
But in the internet age, we owe it to ourselves to remain vigilant to scammers, be it the faceless con artists trying to access your bank accounts from abroad or the flesh and blood version you’ve only just met who’s promising you the world but delivering an atlas (and probably billing you for it too).
In other words, if your date from Plenty of Fish (or whatever site) talks a load of old pollocks, clams up when you ask anything deep and skates around the truth of their financial situation, then chances are they might be a catfish after your money. You have been warned.
NO ONE WANTS HARRY
PRINCE Harry’s highly-paid legal team were back in the High Court yesterday to challenge the Home Office decision that he can’t use armed police guards on visits to Britain.
The hearing will last three days and Harry’s barristers will argue that he doesn’t feel safe bringing his family here without police protection, and that private body-guards can’t match their powers or intelligence-gathering.
GettyPrince Harry’s legal team were back in the High Court to challenge the decision that he can’t use armed police guards[/caption]
His wife Meghan has made it very clear that she’s unlikely to visit the UK ever again, the couple are very much off the “family Christmas at Sandringham” list following the release of their mouthpiece Omid Scobie-doo-do’s latest salvo, and they’re reportedly not invited to the forthcoming nuptials of Harry’s old friend the Duke of Westminster for fear it will be “awks” for the rest of the Royal Family in attendance.
Begging the question: Who, exactly, is Harry coming to the UK to see?
SEEING Julia Roberts’ eye-catching footwear at the UK premiere of her movie Leave The World Behind has reminded me . . . I must add a pair of mop slippers to my Christmas wish list.
GettyJulia Roberts’ eye-catching footwear at the UK premiere of Leave The World Behind[/caption]
I must add a pair of mop slippers to my Christmas wish list
A MAN who stole a Penny Lane street sign as a drunken undergraduate 47 years ago has finally returned it to the city of Liverpool.
What is it with the kleptomania of inebriated students?
PAA man who stole a Penny Lane street sign 47 years ago has finally returned it to the city of Liverpool[/caption]
When I was on a journalism course in Cardiff in the 1980s, my tiny bedsit was made even smaller by the presence of two traffic cones I’d purloined while p***ed.
Why? Absolutely no idea.
Someone else had an estate agent’s sign propped up in their kitchen, while another kept his clothes in a shopping trolley one of his mates had pushed him home in.
As you do.
Though all of this pales in comparison to the student antics described on Reddit and what various items people have woken up with.
They include a “mystery puppy on my head”, a sock full of teaspoons, a life-size cardboard cutout of a Rastafarian man, a road partition, a car bumper and a stuffed bison head.
So it sounds like I was a complete amateur.
Fred, keep your cheffin’ opinions to yourself
WHEN it comes to anything culinary, I’m A Celeb campmate Fred Sirieix would test the patience of Mother Teresa.
So here he is, telling This Morning’s Josie Gibson how to cook potatoes and sausages.
I’m A Celeb campmate Fred Sirieix told Josie Gibson how to cook potatoes and sausageRex
Fred, mate, she has a five-year-old son. She dishes this stuff up all the time.
The difference, of course, is that Josie “cooks” while First Dates maitre d’ Fred clearly suffers from that largely (not all) male affliction of seeing himself as a “chef”. Hence why the showiest “celebrity chefs” on TV are predominantly blokes.
Delia Smith, whose book How To Cook was a bestseller, said in 2008: “Cooking should not be exclusive or ‘cheffy’. It’s about sitting around the table and having a nice meal.
“It puts everybody off if you’ve got some very, very top chef saying, ‘no, that is not right’.”
Exactement. So fermez la bouche Fred and mangez la pomme de terre.
NIGEL’S RUMBA RIDDLE
EASTENDERS actor Nigel Harman had to bow out of Strictly Come Dancing after injuring a rib during rehearsals.
On Saturday’s show he explained that he was “leaping off a rostrum, about to be caught by some very handsome men. As I flew I was Peter Pan. As I landed I was in A&E”.
PANigel Harman bowed out of Strictly after injuring a rib[/caption]
An interesting recall that might warrant (presses monocle to eye) further investigation.
Did he leap into the air before the dancers were ready to catch him?
Or did they mishandle or drop him and his insurance claim is in the post?
As ever with Strictly, sometimes the greatest drama is behind the scenes.
A BARD ONE TO TAKE
MACBETH fans have been issued with trigger warnings for a new production starring David Tennant.
The guidance from London’s Donmar Warehouse reads: “This production explores psychosis and contains suggestions of post-combat and postnatal health concerns.
“On stage there is blood, scenes of violence and depictions of death.”
Which, if you’ve gone to the trouble of booking tickets for it, one imagines you’d already know.
One of my school trips as a teenager was to see Titus Andronicus – “Shakespeare’s bloodiest play” – at the RSC.
It had a body count of 14, involved rape, mutilation, beheadings, unwitting cannibalism and not a “trigger warning” in sight.
And yet somehow we survived unscathed.
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