A disability pensioner is facing homelessness after being scammed out of $40,000 over almost two years.
Tracey Skeates, 63, from Caboolture, Queensland, met ‘Charlotte’ through Instagram and has ended up selling her car and pawning her guitars to keep up with ‘her’ requests for money from October 2023.
Mr. Skeates said to the courier mail The $40,000 he sent Charlotte was inheritance money.
‘A woman called Charlotte contacted me through Instagram. “She said she lived in the United States and asked me if I lived alone,” he said.
“She had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was looking for someone to talk to.”
The relationship progressed quickly and in just one week the confident retiree sent $500 to Charlotte to fix his phone.
And a month after the couple contacted, Charlotte told Mr Skeates she wanted to move to Brisbane to live with him and become his wife.
The pensioner “vividly” remembers wanting to spend Christmas in Australia, but like many scammers, Charlotte said she didn’t have enough money to move, so Skeates started sending larger payments of $3,000 and $4,000.
The disability pensioner was being scammed by a person who had used photographs of Colombian bikini model Yisela Avendaño (pictured), who was not involved in the scam. The scammer said he wanted to marry the Australian and move to Brisbane, which led him to send tens of thousands of dollars.
Charlotte “tried” to fly to Australia “five different times” to be with the disability pensioner, but something always got in the way.
“The first time she tried to fly over she said she was mugged on the way to the airport and was in a coma,” he said.
The excuses kept coming: on another occasion he told Mr Skeates that someone had “planted two grams of heroin” in his luggage.
Charlotte also told Mr Skeates throughout the relationship that her phone camera was broken, so all of their communication was via Instagram and WhatsApp calls.
Every time something went wrong, Mr. Skeates sent more money so he could take Charlotte to Brisbane.
‘I sent him 80 percent of my disability pension every two weeks. “I hardly ate, all in the name of love,” he said.
Skeates, who dreamed of traveling around Australia with the American, said that due to his “stupidity” he went from “having a dream” and enjoying his final years to “not having any fucking hope.”
He warned others that Charlotte always insisted that any payments be sent via Apple gift cards or the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, making the payments nearly impossible to trace.
Tracey Skeates, 63, from Caboolture, Queensland, met ‘Charlotte’ through Instagram and has ended up selling her car and pawning her guitars to keep up with ‘her’ requests for money from October 2023
The scammer, called ‘Charlotte’, said their phone camera was broken and they only sent messages on Instagram and called on WhatsApp (photo messages between Mr Skeates and his scammer posing as ‘Charlotte’).
The pensioner is ashamed to have been scammed out of such a large amount of money and only realized ‘Charlotte’ was fake after doing a reverse image search.
Their search discovered that Charlotte’s profile had stolen images of Yisela Avendaño, who is a Colombian bikini model and has almost a million followers on Instagram.
Incredibly, despite discovering he had been scammed, Grandpa continued sending money.
‘I don’t know why. “They get so into your head that you’re at a boiling point all the time and you lose the ability to think clearly,” he said.
In addition to losing money, the scam also strained her relationship with her daughter Tamika, who had immediately told her that Charlotte wasn’t real.
His daughter said she became “less tolerant” once she found out he was selling his car and said the whole ordeal had “damaged” their relationship.
The Queensland grandfather said he is now “a few weeks” away from living in a tent and is being forced to give up his beloved pet parrot.
The pensioner wants people to ask for help “even if they are ashamed” and hopes that by talking about what happened, it will help others.
Nationwide, more than 27,000 people have been duped in romance scams and lost nearly $20 million in 2024, according to ScamWatch.
In the Sunshine State, 656 people have been caught in romance scams and lost $3 million.
ScamWatch has warned Australians that the festive season may see a spike in cases as scammers target vulnerable and lonely people.