IRIS Jones, the irrepressible pensioner who was taken in by her Egyptian husband, has a new saying in her life, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” and she’s putting it to good use in her new venture – finding a replacement partner....CONTINUE READING
Within six months of dumping 38-year-old Mohamed Ibrahim, Iris signed up to a dating website and ever since has been bombarded by potential suitors.
But she fast discovered how many online romance scammers there are. Iris, who lives in a bungalow in Weston Super Mare, says, “I’m the Miss Marple of romance fraudsters, I look for clues constantly to see whether they’re genuine.
“I’m no idiot and pride myself on being canny. “But I enjoy wasting the scammers’ time and playing along with them, pretending I don’t realise what they’re up to.
“At least by doing that they’re concentrating on me and not another unsuspecting woman.” Iris’s mission coincides with recently released figures that show romance scams rose by a fifth last year and the average amount lost was nearly £7,000.
Speaking exclusively to Fabulous she says, “It makes me so angry and brings up how I felt towards Mohamed when I dumped him.”
Iris, who has two sons, Stephen, 57, and Darren, 56, met Mohamed through an atheist group on Facebook in June 2019.
They soon started private messaging each other and in November 2019 she went to visit him for the first time after she told him she’d always wanted to see the pyramids and he invited me to stay.
I’m 36 and moved from Egypt to be with my Brit wife, 81 – trolls say I’m a scammer but I love brushing her grey hair while she irons my shirts
She remembers, “He arrived at the airport with a bunch of roses and swept me off my feet. “The first night we made love and it felt incredible. It was like being a virgin again – I hadn’t had sex since I divorced my first husband 27 years before.
“He kept telling me how much he loved me and wanted to marry me, right from the beginning.” Iris ended up staying for a month, and Mohamed proposed while she was there.
She carried on visiting him and they got married in October 2020 in Egypt and Mohamed came to live in England in November 2021.
To begin with their relationship was happy, Mohamed got a job in their local supermarket as a security guard, he paid Iris housekeeping and they still made love regularly and at other times would curl up and watch documentaries together.
Iris says, “We had some good times, but I think then I was still infatuated and was wearing rose tinted glasses so I ignored the bad parts.
“I wonder now whether I ever really loved him. “Our relationship became toxic and I knew I had to end it.” So now Iris approaches every potential romance with a healthy dose of scepticism and has become aware of potential romance scams.
She says, “My most recent fraudster was a man called Roly who immediately started making huge declarations. “He wrote in one message just a couple of days into ‘meeting’ online, ‘You are the first thing that comes to mind when I wake up and the last thing when I sleep.
Thank you for making me happy. I hope to hear from you tomorrow. Goodnight my love.’ “It immediately rang alarm bells – how could I be his love after just a few messages?”
Iris is also clued up on the fact that scammers often have a sob story – in this case he said his wife and daughter had died seven years ago.
And they frequently work away, Roly claimed to be working on an oil rig near Milan. Iris says, “I could tell it wasn’t true.
“And sure enough he was soon asking me for my email address and home address, claiming he wanted to send me some precious jewellery because he loved me so much.
“I managed to string it along for a while, but eventually he realised that I clearly wasn’t going to hand over my details.
“I’ve since looked up that he would probably have claimed I needed to pay the courier to get him to deliver it and then I’d get his precious jewels.”
Iris is now on a mission to discourage other women from falling for romance scams. “I want to warn women never to give out details,” she says.
“I do some other things too – I will always try to get their surname as early as possible and then Google them, I will get a friend to do a reverse image search – in this case Roly had numerous online profiles and warnings from other women – and ask them to send selfies showing where they are.
“It’s amazing how many people disappear when you do that. It’s a good way to sort out who’s genuine.” And Iris has met some genuine people – though she’s very fussy about what she wants.
She admits, “Men seem to let themselves go as they get older, so I still want a younger man, but only 10 or so years now, not 46.
“I was chatting to one man who was lovely, but he was a bit big for me, so we agreed to be friends. “At the moment I’m talking to an artist, I can’t find him doing a reverse image search but I’m moving very cautiously as it doesn’t feel quite right. I’ve learnt my lesson…CONTINUE READING>>
