Woman who sent £61,000 to boyfriend she never met devastated after discovering the truth about him

A woman ended up paying her fake boyfriend $80,000 (£61,000) before realising that the relationship wasn't real and she was being scammed.

You've heard of 'catfishing', right? No, not that kind of catfish, the kind where someone on the internet takes another person's picture and pretends to be them.

The name has nothing to do with transporting cod across the Atlantic Ocean and it really makes far less sense the more you try to explain it, just as long as we're all on the same page about it being a way to dupe someone using a fake persona on the internet.

Righty-ho, with that cleared up let's get back to the woman who paid tens of thousands of dollars to a man she'd never met who didn't exist.

The woman in question was Terri, who started talking to a man who called himself Ricardo on Facebook Messenger.

YouTube/Dr. Phil

He told her he was wealthy and looking for someone to spoil, and that while he was from Los Angeles, his work kept him in Montreal, Canada so they couldn't meet up.

They hit it off pretty quickly, telling each other they were in love and speaking on the phone a couple of times a day.

Then about a month into the relationship, Ricardo asked Terri to invest $10,000 (£7,600) in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and told her she'd be a millionaire within six months.

Over time, she sent in somewhere in the region of $80,000 while her family told her they were worried this whole thing was a scam, and tried to convince Terri about it.

She said that there was 'always an excuse' whenever they made plans to meet up and her sister, Tammy, took Terri onto Dr Phil, where she kept insisting that she believed Ricardo was real.

YouTube/Dr. Phil

However, the show did a bit of digging into the matter and found out that Ricardo was actually a man called James who had never spoken to Terri.

Instead he was the person the catfish had stolen the photos from, and he explained that this wasn't even the first time he'd had his likeness stolen.

In a recorded video, he told Dr Phil he'd been 'dealing with this for over 10 years' and hoped people would understand that his photos were being used by scammers and that it wasn't him.

Terri, meanwhile, said she was 'heartbroken' to discover that Ricardo was a scammer but did say that she didn't blame James and 'won't punch him out' if she ever sees him in person.