Ellen was retired, living a comfortable life in a nice home in British Columbia. In the driveway was a luxury car, and her house was paid for.

And then she joined an online dating site, hoping to find some companionship.

Instead of romance, Ellen says she lost her life savings, and more — over $1.3 million — seemingly taken by an online scam where villains prey on people looking for their perfect partner.

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Ellen’s is a story that is hard to believe, and even more difficult to comprehend. How could a mature, self-sufficient woman send such a huge sum of money to someone she never even met?

She reported the loss to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and is now their biggest recorded victim of so-called romance fraud — a new take on the Nigerian email scam.

Romance frauds are the most lucrative scam in Canada. Over the past four years, Canadians have reported losses of almost $50 million to authorities. And the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre thinks only a small percentage of victims tell anyone what’s happened to them.

Behind the flowery words and promises of love, an investigation by CTV’s W5 and the Star has discovered, are criminal gangs, many in West Africa, running dozens of cons at once.

“What we’re dealing with is organized crime,” says Daniel Williams of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. “No one is doing this to one person. For the one person that contacts us about it, there are 15 who have not, and 30 who will be scammed in future.”

This is how it works: A man or woman — both are at risk — signs on to a dating website. He or she might be attracted by the photo someone posts: a pretty young woman, or a soldier in uniform. Or someone might reach out and start the conversation.

Once contact is made, things get intense fast. According to a U.K. study, “at a very early stage the scammer declares their love for the victim,” and asks that they move off the dating website and onto another form of communication, such as instant messenger or private email.

A story, often highly detailed, is woven. According to the University of Leicester study, and interviews with experts here in Canada, there are commonalities. For men, the female scammer presents herself to her target as “young and vulnerable.”

For women, the man-on-the-make may say he’s wealthy or of high status, like a businessman or top soldier. He may also have a touching backstory: widowed, “lost their wife in a tragic accident, and are sometimes left with a child to care for.”

“They want to know who you’re looking for,” Williams says. “They want to know who you’re looking for because that’s who they become.”

Then comes the ask.

“Some are asking for money within two weeks,” Williams says. “Some wait nine months before making their approach.” Why? “Because they have hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the go. Because they have so much money coming in, they can wait.”

The reason for the request probably meshes with the story: their passport has been lost, or their child needs a doctor, or there’s some other emergency. It can start with a few hundred dollars, or a thousand. The amounts can build until the victim becomes suspicious, or there’s nothing left.

Ellen, now 65, says there’s nothing left.

It’s a complicated tale, which she traces back to October 2010, when a girlfriend urged her to try online dating. Why not, thought Ellen, even though she’d previously dipped her toe in the pool of men online, and found them wanting.

She was single, her kids were grown and had lives of their own. So Ellen — who agreed to speak to the Star only on condition of anonymity — says she signed up to Match.com. “I thought it would be fun just to banter back and forth with somebody,” she says.

The man she says she met online called himself Dave Field. His picture was that of a somewhat handsome, balding middle-aged man. As Ellen and “Dave” chatted online and occasionally on the phone, she says she told her he was of Swedish descent and was living in Los Angeles.

His accent was a bit off, she thought, but still. Ellen says she was intrigued. And Los Angeles? That wasn’t far from B.C. So Ellen approached the idea of meeting up, and “Dave” seemed keen.

“I said, ‘If there was no chance of you coming to Canada, I’ll come to L.A.,’ ” she recalls. “He didn’t balk at that.”

But when she booked her ticket, she says, things changed. He was busy. He had appointments. She cancelled the reservation. A few weeks later, she tried again. Again, he dodged her.

“So I just put it on the line and said, ‘What’s up with this? Why are we playing games?’ ” Ellen recalls. “He said, ‘It’s not a game.’ And what was the excuse? He was trying to unravel his father’s estate.”

That is when it appears the scam began in earnest.

Ellen says “Dave” told her he had been left a sizeable inheritance offshore, but because of a lawyer’s incompetence, he had to clear some debts before he could sell the assets.

“I am of the nature that I would help anybody,” Ellen says. “I don’t like the idea of not being able to help somebody if I can.”

Emails from “Dave” to Ellen, which she provided to the Star, use endearments like “baby,” “honey” and “sweetheart,” and end with “hugs, kisses and love.” Ellen says she wasn’t head-over-heels for him — which would make her different from many other victims of romance scams — and by the end of the con, she just wanted her money back.

She says she tried to send the first sum of $945 via Western Union, but the employee refused: “She said to me, ‘Do you know this person? If you don’t know this person, don’t send it. I’m not sending it.’ ”

Ellen found another way: by MoneyGram. Eventually, she says, “Dave” would give her bank account numbers and she would wire him — or people purporting to act for him — wire transfers for tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, at a time. (Documentation provided by Ellen shows transfers of roughly $1.3 million, in U.S. dollars, euros and British pounds.)

It appears the cash flowed out of Ellen’s investment account and into accounts in Hong Kong, Greece, Singapore — and directly to Lagos, Nigeria. She says she travelled to London and Madrid to meet people who “Dave” said would get her money back and each time came home with a diminished bank balance.

Ellen says she sent the first few thousand to help “Dave” out – and the rest followed as an attempt to get back the money she’d lost.

“It was, ‘You’ve already sent me this money — how am I supposed to pay you back if we don’t go to the next step?’ ” Ellen says he told her. “And at one point I said, ‘If this keeps up, I’m going to be bankrupt.’ ”

Even Ellen is at a loss to explain how an adult, who says she had accumulated a tidy nest egg by growing an inheritance through canny property purchases, could be taken in by the fraudsters.

“It’s like I was living in a fog,” Ellen says. “I just felt as though I was in a fog, for months and months on end.”

Dr. Scott Haltzman, a Florida-based psychiatrist, says that simply being online and looking for love can leave people more vulnerable because they have gone public with their desire to make a connection.

“This makes it easy for someone who wants to take advantage . . . to foster an intense romantic relationship, even though (it) may be entirely one-sided,” he says.

“Ultimately, people enter Internet relationships with a sense of hope, and the hallmark from all hope is the belief that the end result will be positive. This permits people to ignore potential pitfalls, particularly when the person who is scamming them continues to reassure (them) that there is nothing to worry about.”

Ellen says her fog lifted when a male relative told her point-blank that she was being conned. She ultimately reported a loss of $1.332 million to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, which compiles information and forwards it to law enforcement for investigation.

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They referred her case to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in B.C. Authorities there are unable to confirm what happened to that complaint.

People familiar with romance frauds say that it’s generally not one person running a scam — so someone like “Dave” was probably several different people. (“When we hear consumers say, ‘he’ or ‘she,’ we say it’s not a man. It’s not a woman,” Williams says. “It’s a dozen people working the keyboard.”)

Many romance frauds end before the losses run as high as Ellen says hers was, but that doesn’t mean they are less significant, and not just in financial terms.

Because the victims believe they are in a real relationship, they haven’t just lost their money: they’ve also lost a boyfriend or girlfriend, and the future that person had promised them.

“When you find out the person you’ve been talking to is a scam, it’s really the same thing as having a death in the family, except this is fraud,” says Rob Rogers, a moderator at the site romancescams.org, and himself the one-time victim of a con. “You’re still going to go through all the stages of grieving.”

Rogers, who lives in Halifax, says he lost $14,000 from an RRSP account and was so convinced the young woman he believed he was chatting with online was real that he went to the airport to wait for her.

Now he works online to keep people safe, and jokes that while scammers took a chunk of money from him, he has had his revenge by preventing others from being scammed, and keeping money out of the crooks’ pockets.

Sites like christianmingle.com, JDate, e-harmony and match.com warn up front that you shouldn’t send anyone money, “especially overseas or by wire transfer,” and they ask for site users to report any approaches to them.

Asked for comment on the issue of romance scams, Match.com officials said in a statement that the company has “an extensive fraud management team comprised of certified fraud examiners, analysts and technologists who police all entry points for fraud” and reviews users who meet a “basic threshold of risk.”

“Although we take extensive safety and security measures with activity that happens on our site and we respond immediately when we are alerted of issues, we are not capable of policing what happens once our members move beyond our features and begin exchanging information or meeting in person,” the statement says.

One of the first things Rogers does when counselling someone who’s worried about their online lover is to have them trace the IP address their alleged beloved is writing from. This lets them check that their boyfriend or girlfriend’s computer really is where they say it is.

There are other red flags: spelling or grammar is particularly bad; they claim to be American or Canadian but are working overseas; they ignore personal questions.

And then there’s the issue of location.

“As soon as a Nigeria or Ghana connection comes into a story, it’s a scam for sure,” Rogers says, adding parts of the former Soviet Union, Indonesia and Malaysia are also problematic.

But it’s West Africa that’s particularly problematic. The websites of the RCMP, Interpol, and the U.S. Secret Service all warn about the Nigerian email scam, also called a 419 scam, so-called after the part of the country’s penal code which forbids it.

While the money ultimately ends up in West Africa, it can be routed through North America. Because asking someone to send funds directly to Nigeria could set off alarm bells, one gang asked its victims to instead send cash to their contacts in the U.S. In Colorado, two women were recently jailed for their role in a romance scam.

“What we had is someone in Colorado being the agent that was receiving money as part of the scam and then transferring it to Nigeria,” Colorado Attorney-General John Suthers told W5 in an interview in Denver. “We were able to put together a case in Colorado.’

Romance scams, Suthers said, used to require some ingenuity. The Internet has changed that.

“Before, you typically had to actually enter into a relationship and you know, take her out for dinner a couple of times and find out how much money she had and then rip her off,” Suthers said. “That was hard work.

“It’s a lot easier to sit in a boiler room in Nigeria and perpetrate this type of scam, and all you have to do is rap out a couple hundred emails a day and never have to pay for dinner or flowers or anything.”

And yet, some people are still convinced it’s true love.

“Sometimes people don’t want to let go of the dream,” Rogers says.

“Most are in disbelief. They know something is wrong, but they don’t know what it is. I tell them if they have a gut feeling about something, they should trust that because gut feelings are usually right.”

Ellen agrees. Asked what advice she’d give others, she’s blunt.

“Never make a payment. Never. That first payment is the hook,” she says. “I wish I could shake people.”

W5’s report Cheatin’ Hearts airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV

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