My Online Nightmare

This episode examines astonishing cases of sex fraud, including a man who was attacked by another man when he thought he was meeting up with his dream girl from a dating website

This episode examines stories of romances that started online but ended in deception, fraud and bigamy, including the man who posed as a CIA agent to defraud women

Kurt and his new girlfriend were contacted repeatedly on Facebook with abusive messages by a mysterious woman called Suzie. One evening Kurt was violently stabbed by two masked men and narrowly escaped with his life. The attackers were hired by Luigi Dalli, after he had plotted a contract killing on Kurt, for starting a relationship with his ex. They had agreed to kill Kurt for £500 each. Meanwhile, CBS news anchor Erika von Tiehl was terrified when she received abusive anonymous texts. The cyberstalking escalated to identity theft and murder threats. Eventually police arrested serial stalker John Hart, who Erica had dated and who became obsessed with her after she dumped him.

This episode tells three extraordinary stories of women targeted by con artists and defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Single mum Annie Ruddock met Matthew Samuels through an online dating site in January 2013. He not only conned Annie out of most of her £80,000 inheritance, but left four other women and a man bereft of £180,000 over three years and fathered ten children. Joe and Keith Barnett were cruelly conned out of thousands of pounds when surrogate Louise Pollard dashed their hopes of having a child, turning out to be a duplicitous, cunning, and a manipulative fraud. And university professor Judith fell in love with totally fictitious John, who fooled her into handing over £140,000. She became the victim of a sophisticated online fraud which has left her not only emotionally devastated but with a very uncertain financial future.