How To Be Lonely (And Broke)

I work for a bank a major high-street bank in the UK, specifically in the fraud department. In 2018, a customer called in because we wouldn’t let him access his account. Normally, we only restrict accounts if there are security concerns or if we think they’re a fraudster. I pulled up his account and notes, and I could tell something was off, mainly because of the twenty pages of notes, each with ten notes a page.

The more I read, the more gobsmacked I became. For the last three years, this customer had been under the impression that he was in a relationship with Rita Ora. That’s right — the actual singer-songwriter Rita Ora. At every opportunity, this customer had sent money to numerous destinations at the request of his “girlfriend”, and no matter what he had been told by staff or police, he still did not believe that he was a victim of a scam and was being robbed. (We had to get the police involved because we could only assume a person so duped had to be a danger to themselves.)

He told us that he had met her family and been to their houses. Unfortunately, he had never met Rita personally because she had such a busy timetable.

As I’m sure anyone would, I felt pity that someone was so deep in an illusion and being taken advantage of. Surely, you’d think, this person was vulnerable, perhaps a low-income gent late in life, and this was the only joy to which he clung.

No, this man was twenty-six. I have no idea what his job was, but it pulled in a cool £8,000 (around 9,900 USD) a month after tax. Granted, most of that was sent to “Rita”. He started trying to hide his dealings when people tried to stop him, but as far as we could confirm, in total, he had sent her over £250,000 (over 300,000 USD) over these years.

I later found out that we had no choice but to close his account down; even after the highest head of my department physically went to this person with all our evidence of him being robbed, he still wouldn’t see the light.