This guy pretended to be a doctor and scammed over 30 women for over a million bucks!
And he’s been convicted 66 times for fraud!
Who are some of the best romance scammers out there?!
Let’s get right to it!
4 - Florida Tinder Swindler Brian Brainard Wedgeworth was a casanova scammer
who duped over 30 women out of 1.3 million dollars through his romance scamming!Brian
Wedgeworth carried out his scam by targeting victims on social media networks.
He took victims from every network he could find – including LinkedIn.
He created fake aliases and profiles on these networks and lied that he was an accomplished
surgeon looking to settle down.
To gain the trust of the women he was about to scam, Brian would tell them that he would
pay off their debt.
He often said that he didn’t want the women he wanted in his life to have any debt.
These women would then give him their banking information because they believed that he
wanted to pay off their mortgage and other associated debts.
Loopholed
He made his scam even more believable by sending electronic payments to the bank accounts of
these women.
These payments were made through accounts with insufficient funds that had been closed
by the banks.
Unfortunately, there was a banking loophole that made the women get alerts that their
debts had been paid in full, even though the payments themselves hadn’t been cleared.
After making these payments, he would convince his victims to lend him cash to settle some
bills.
Sometimes he said that he didn’t have access to his funds because he was fighting a medical
malpractice lawsuit.
Other times he said that he no longer had any cash because he had paid off these women’s
debts.
Many of his victims would then lend him huge amounts of cash, and he would ask them to
deposit the cash into bank accounts that had his real name.
He usually told them that the owner of this bank account was a business partner.
One of his victims was a woman named Tekesia Johnson.
According to Ms. Johnson, Brian lied that he was a thoracic surgeon and then lied that
he had paid off her mortgage for her.
Once he got her to trust him, he convinced her to buy him a Rolex so that she could begin
to stabilize her credit.
After Ms. Johnson bought the watch, she realized that she had been scammed because his mortgage
payment for her failed to clear.
That was when she began to dig around and realized that the man she was in love with
was a serial fraudster.
By then, he was already long gone from her life.
Undercover
Brian didn’t just tell fantastic lies to scam women, he also told fantastic lies to
stop his shady past from being discovered.
When one of his victims confronted him after discovering that he was an ex-convict, he
lied and told her that his arrest wasn’t real and that he was merely an undercover
cop who worked with the police to catch corrupt correctional facility officers.
He said that his conviction was all a part of his cover and that the only reason he wasn’t
practicing medicine was that he was still undercover!
Aftermath
All in all, Brian was able to scam over 30 women for about $1.3 million bucks.
In the end, he was apprehended by the police and was sentenced to nine years in prison
for his efforts.
This sentence was also to be followed by three years of supervised release.
The judge ordered him to pay over a million dollars in restitution.
3 - King Con The wedding looked like anyone’s dream wedding.
Then 61 year old bride Carol Goodall was in an immaculate white dress, and her husband
Gary Rodgers, who was 6 years older, was in a charcoal black suit that looked amazing
as well.
The whole scene was complete with around 70 attendees made up of family and friends.
It was picture perfect and was the kind of wedding anyone could seem to want.
Richard Robinson
However, this wedding wasn’t what it seemed.
It wasn’t even a lawful wedding.
And the man standing at the altar wasn’t named Garry Rodgers.
He went by a different legal name and Gary Rodgers was just one of his many aliases.
His legal name was Richard Robinson, and this wedding was just another one of his many romance
scams.
Richard Robinson was a professional fraudster who targeted older women with middle-class
income through internet dating sites.
He had been a serial scammer for over 10 years where he would continually scam women for
money!
Tower Of Lies
Richard had been scamming women by telling them tall tales of love since at least 2013
when he was jailed in North Wales for defrauding four other women.
He told the women the same old and tired story he told most of his victims.
He said he was a widowed businessman whose wife had died of cancer, and that he was waiting
for a big payout from his insurers.
After a short period of romance, he usually proposed and then would start requesting cash
to sort out completely fabricated bills.
He was able to scam these four women of eighteen thousand pounds through these false stories.
And he did all of that within two years.
He was also jailed for securing about seven hundred and fifty pounds in loans from banks
with false identities.
But that’s just the scams that the police can prove.
According to Barbara Salvage, a police constable who had traced Richard’s criminal history,
he probably started scamming as far back as the eighties.
And most of his scams have the same MO.
He befriends women, gets them to fall in love with him, and then borrows money from them
without paying it back.
Richard was no amateur at the fraud game, and sometimes he was running these romance
scams with three or four women at the same time.
But even the best criminals slip up, and Richard’s slip up came when he met Carol Goodall.
He met her on an internet dating site like many of his victims, and she had taken a quick
liking to him.
At the end of her ordeal, Carol said that she had found it very easy to speak with him
because they had a lot of things in common.
What she didn’t know was that scammers like Richards had a habit of scouting their potential
victims and creating a persona they knew their victims would love.
At first Richard’s attempt at scamming Carol went well, and he got her to agree to marry
him.
But a day before the marriage, he informed her that his divorce from his ex-wife was
taking longer than expected, and their wedding would be a blessing ceremony instead of a
wedding.
Carol accepted this explanation because it sounded sincere and she had no reason to doubt
him.
But Richards wasn’t sincere.
He simply didn’t want to get lawfully married to Carol, as that could legally implicate
him and perhaps make Carol entitled to his assets.
After convincing Carol to have a ceremony but not get legally married, he got to work
on her.
Before the wedding, he had convinced her to sell her house to foot the expenses of a motor
company he had put in her name.
He had also convinced her to part with around sixty thousand pounds she was saving for her
children.
After taking her money he put her mind to rest by putting his business in her name.
Of course, this was also a sham.
Carol said that he always showed her papers about the business whenever she was cleaning
or cooking so she never really got a chance to inspect them properly.
Perhaps if she had, she may have discovered his lies.
Carol's Misfortunes
Richard started to show his hand after his marriage to Carol.
He lied that he had a boat fixing business which meant he had to be away and around the
country for long days at a time.
But in truth, he was scamming another woman and that scam required his physical presence.
Carol grew suspicious of his behavior and decided that she would snoop around and see
what she could find.
One day she received a disturbing text from another woman claiming to be her husband's
lover, and that’s when Richard’s tower of lies began to come crumbling down.
Carol phoned the woman and they had a two-hour-long chat where they discovered that they had both
been scammed by Richard.
Both women quickly sprung into action and contacted the police and an investigation
was immediately launched.
However, Carol made sure not to confront Richard immediately.
She was still holding out hope that she would be able to recover some of her money.
Unfortunately for her, she never got her money back.
Throughout all of this, Richard maintained his routine and continued to target new victims.
Just three months after discovering her husband’s real life, Carol found about a third potential
victim.
She had been snooping through his emails and discovered that another woman was about to
sell her home to fund a shady business owned by Richard.
Carol sprung into action and quickly wrote to the victim to warn her.
Aftermath
By then, the police had seen enough to arrest Richard.
However, he skipped bail the first opportunity he had and led the police on a chase that
lasted several weeks.
But even Richard, as slippery as he was, couldn’t run forever.
When he was eventually caught by the police, they discovered several phones on him.
It was obvious that he had one phone for each victim, and that he was as unrepentant as
they come.
He was taken to court and was jailed for ten years for his troubles.
Surprisingly, Richard does have a real wife that he’s a hundred percent honest with.
Her name is Janet Flowers and he married her back in 2008.
She says he’s scammed her too, but he still has a marital relationship with her.
Unsurprisingly, she’s the only one he had gotten married to.
If we were prone to romanticizing the lives of career criminals we would have said she
was his one true love.
Today, he still phones her from prison, and she still picks up.
2 - Kaye Ferguson Kaye Ferguson got a divorce and was looking
for love.
Instead, she got scammed twice and then was brainwashed to run a scam herself!Kaye Ferguson
was a financial officer for the Mulwala Water Ski Club.
She got divorced from her husband in 2020 and then decided to join an online dating
site for people in their fifties.
That was when she met the first person who scammed her.
Her first scammer was a man who blackmailed her into sending him a hundred and thirty
thousand dollars under the threat of sending her explicit images to her children.
Puppetered
After sending the money and dealing with that scam, Kaye encountered a man named William
David Rodavan who said he was an engineer who traveled often for work.
They became close, and one day while they were talking, Kaye heard a loud bang and David
hung up.
A few days later he called her back and said that he’d been in a horrible explosion that
killed a majority of his workers and that he needed cash to pay out to their families.
At first, she only sent the little money she had.
But he became incessant and Kaye decided to start stealing from her company to give to
David.
She withdrew money from Mulwala Water Ski Club about 27 times and paid about a million
dollars to David in total.
Aftermath
Her scam was discovered by the CEO of the club when he visited her home and she told
him about it.
She was promptly arrested and taken to court.
The judge who saw her case said that she was also a victim and was merely a lonely woman
who’d been victimized by successive scammers.
He sentenced her to three years of intensive correction and ordered her to repay the club.
She’s paid around three hundred thousand dollars of her total debt, but a lot of it
is still outstanding.
1 - Doctorate in Scamming Sebastian Astbury simply can’t help himself.
He’s been convicted of fraud a whopping 66 times!
Sebastian is a scammer who’s posed for many different positions!
He has posed as an MI5 agent, a Lord, a Royal Navy officer, a banker, a landscaper, a property
developer, and a shipping magnate.
In one of his most successful scams, he was able to defraud a woman and her daughter of
a hundred thousand pounds by posing as a wealthy marine officer.
It was an audacious romance scam that he pulled off by targeting his victim on the website
Plentyoffish.com
Serial Scams
But he didn’t just do romance scams.
He did all kinds of scams.
He once pretended to be a car salesman so that he could swindle four men out of twenty-five
thousand pounds to lease luxury cars that didn’t exist.
The extraordinary thing about Sebastian is that he’s been convicted 66 times before!
For his last stint in jail, he served 12 months of a two years sentence and was released on
the condition that he would stop requesting money from potential clients for services
not yet rendered.
Just a few months after getting out of jail, Sebastian breached this rule by posing as
a landscaper on Mybuilder.com.
He called his business New Forest Landscape and Design, but in reality, it was all a front
to get new victims.
In time, he swindled one David Rusell out of three thousand pounds.
Mr. Rusell paid the money upfront for a landscaping job and was shocked when a few days later
the account of the business he conversed with was deleted off Mybuilder.com.
Aftermath
According to Mr. Russell, this scam left him with feelings of hopelessness and stupidity.
He even said he was now unnecessarily cynical and was even scared of making a bank transfer
for a car because of the fear of getting ripped off again.
Astonishingly enough, Sebastian’s lawyer said that he had simply gotten carried away
by compulsive spending habits.
The lawyer argued that Sebastian doesn’t go into these ventures intending to scam people.
After all, the lawyer said, he had delivered these services to others.
What happened was that he spent too much on personal expenses and simply no longer had
the means to deliver the services to Mr. Russell.
His lawyer argued that Sebastian wasn’t a fraud, but a bad accountant.
The judge presiding over the case didn’t agree and instead sentenced Sebastian to two
and a half years in prison.
He was also ordered to pay back £1,500 to his victim.
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Let us know in the comment section what you’d rather do, go on a blind date set up by your
friend or go on a date through an app like Tinder or Bumble!