Becky Holmes

“Romance fraud is somebody using the guise of having a relationship with you to extort money out of you and it’s people who are pretending to be somebody else. They approach women and they will often say that they are an oil rig worker, a pilot – it’s often a sexy job – one that they think women will find attractive. They will contact women left, right and centre over Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and all the dating sites and very, very quickly they will tell you that they’ve got feelings for you. So within a couple of days they might say that they love you and very soon after that, a series of events will happen which mean they need financial help and, of course, as their one true love, they think that you want to help them and that you should be helping them.”

Today my guest is author Becky Holmes. Becky is an influencer who works tirelessly to expose online perpetrators of romance fraud. Romance fraud is when somebody uses the ruse of a relationship to extort money. Through social media Becky publishes her interactions with the perpetrators and exposes their false identities in an effort to raise awareness of this growing problem. I was really happy to have Becky on as a guest to discuss her campaign in detail and also to find out more about her forthcoming book Keanu Reeves Is NOT In Love With You. So I hope you are sitting comfortably and happy to stay with us.

I started off our chat by asking Becky about her campaign (00:30), dealing with serious threats (03:30), and the way police forces are handling this type of fraud (06:06). We then moved on to the definition of romance fraud (11:33), the percentages of gender involved and targeted (13:18), and how the scams are developing with modern technology (16:30). I then asked Becky about her forthcoming book Keanu Reeves Is NOT In Love With You and how it was created (20:20), about working on Twitter with an ever growing following (26:40), and about the most prolific source of the scammers. Towards the second half of the podcast, I asked Becky about the importance of her campaign (35:18), advice for those who may want to know how to avoid these types of scams (38:58), and when she is hoping to release the book (45:15). At the end of the episode I asked Becky what she is reading and watching at the moment (47:45).

Show Notes

• Becky on Twitter
• Becky on Instagram
• Pre-order the book
• For more, hear my conversation with Benjamin Chesterton, Suswati Basu and Joe Gonzalez.

If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe, review and rate: Spotify and Apple Podcasts