- Melissa Love was scammed by Facebook, but she came up with a plan to get her money back
- Were you deceived? Send an email to tips@dailymail.com.
A mother who was robbed after buying fake Taylor Swift tickets has told how she was retaliated against and got her money back.
Melissa Love, 51, was scammed out of £680 after she tried to score sold-out tickets for her teenage daughter.
Melissa, who runs her own web design business, The Design Space, was shocked by a seemingly innocent post in a small community group on Facebook.
She transferred funds to a man calling himself “Dave Shepard”, who had mutual friends and a credible reputation.
But she never received tickets for the Eras Tour and soon realized that Dave, who initially “passed the mood test”, was in fact a Russian scammer and had deceived her.
But she warned: “If there’s one lesson every hustler in life should learn, it’s to never cross a graphic designer.”
Ms Love, from Fowey in Cornwall, had almost resigned herself to her fate after seeing other members of the group also fall for the ruse.
But she developed a devious plan to try to scare the scammer into returning her money.
She falsified her bank’s fraud prevention documents and made false statements about the International Banking Act of 1979 in hopes that it would scare him enough to return the money.
One of the messages sent to him said: “I have good news. “I just spoke to my bank’s fraud team and they can run a report to find the IP address of where your Wise account was last accessed which will show your location.”
She then created an imaginary army of fellow villagers who also plotted against him.
One of her friends sent a message saying they had a friend in the fraud department at foreign exchange company Wise, and he had caught and prosecuted “numerous” scammers.
None of this was true, but it scared the scammer.
Ms Love continued: “I hope Dave is imagining a gang of well-mannered Englishmen with pitchforks and really good computer skills.
“Like Peaky Blinders, but with spaniels and a flask of tea.”
After a weekend of “unmasking the scammer,” as she called it, she was delighted to find the money back in her bank account on Monday morning.
She added: “I was so excited. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a case before, but I’m glad I gave him a few sleepless nights over the weekend.”
Ever since the Eras Tour was announced, stories of potential scams have been circulating everywhere.
Tickets have been notoriously difficult to come by, with hopeful buyers worried about pre-sale codes, huge queues and Ticketmaster glitches.
Last month, a mum from Newport, Wales, warned of the same scam after losing £750.
She said the woman who sold the tickets seemed legitimate and had a mutual friend.
Hours later, she still had no tickets and her Facebook profile had been deleted.
Ms Love said: “I would tell people: don’t buy anything from someone unless you know them personally in real life.”
“I wouldn’t trust selling tickets unless you can go to the person and they can hand it over and it says ‘general admission unrestricted’ or just go through the official ticket resale sites.
“There was so much detail in the profile and we had seven mutual friends on Facebook, so he must have been posting this for ages and was in a small village Facebook group.” I just hope he had a really bad Monday and was wondering if the fraud team was going to come knocking on his door.
“We still don’t have tickets, but maybe Taylor will hear about it and reach out to us, who knows.”