A beautiful professor at a business school in Rotterdam who believed an African student in Turkey who she met on Tinder was a Dutch engineer has been conned out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The fraudster told the grieving Belgian mother of two, Carolina Berrocal, who lost her husband in 2020, that he was Dutchman Patrick Anderson, and that he was an engineer working on road and bridge projects.
The mother of two, who is a professor at Rotterdam International Business School, explained that a friendship quickly formed between the two, and that at one point he told her he was moving to Istanbul to buy machinery and parts.
Once he was there, he had allegedly asked her to send him USD 300,000 (GBP 270,000) to complete the purchase of the machines as although he had USD 690,000 (GBP 565,000)in his account, the Internet was not working.
In order to prevent his embarrassment, she forwarded the cash and then further demands came, including USD 5,000 (GBP 4,100) for shipping and then USD 8,500 (GBP 7,000) after he claimed he was stuck at the hotel.
The demands continued, with a contractor who needed to be paid USD 48,000 (GBP 39,000) and then USD 27,000 (GBP 22,100) to support his struggling business.
When she made the final payment and asked when she would get the money back, the conman threatened to cut off the ties, and also told her that if she paid another USD 200,000 she would have 10 million transferred over to her account.
Realising that things were not as they seemed, she managed to alert prosecutors in Istanbul, where she hired a lawyer, and she started researching in more detail and discovered that the conman was a student named Alie Koroma from Sierra Leone.
She found that the pictures she had been sent were actually from an American life coach, and that the fraudster had also targeted a woman in Romania that was also a victim of the student, who was studying in the faculty of political sciences at Istanbul’s Marmara University.
The prosecutor’s office has now launched an investigation. The age of the professor was not given.
