The true story of a life unravelled by heartbreak and internet scams.

Sofija Stefanovic visits her 80-year-old friend Bill and suspects he’s being scammed over the internet – not for the first time. Compelled by Bill’s devastating stories of online dating, heartbreak and bankruptcy, Sofija gets drawn into the underworld of romance scams.

I’m coming up the staircase of Bill’s apartment building with two bottles of wine. We’ll drink one bottle now, and the other he’ll savour for weeks.

I met Bill at a romance-scam victims’ support group two years ago. I was working on a TV show about internet scams, and Bill was one of our stars.

Bill, like millions of other people around the world, joined an online dating site and met someone. After a while, his long-distance lover asked Bill for a small amount of money. This wasn’t a big deal: friends ask each other for loans all the time – credit cards expire, bills get too high, rent is increased. Bill, a generous person, sent the small sum through without raising an eyebrow. Then his significant other needed some more money.

The situation escalated, and, over several years, Bill became involved in a horrific tale of love, death and crime, all the while sending money to a growing cast of characters. When he began to suspect he was being conned, Bill was contacted by police, who assured him they were about to catch the scammers (they were, in fact, scammers themselves). A manager at Barclays bank was holding onto the money Bill was owed (also a scammer). Bill had lost all of his savings, mortgaged his flat and borrowed money from friends. He was sending his pension away as soon as he got it, in the wild hope that he would, one day, get his money back. He was scammed out of more than $80,000. It left him an emotional wreck, and drowning in debt.

But Bill is, I believe, a success story. When I met him two years ago, he had just come out of his scam, ready to tell the tale and help others in the same situation. Bill and I stayed in touch after he participated in the TV show, and I visit him whenever I come to Brisbane.

On Bill’s door, there is a little plaque with his name, and ‘Justice of the Peace’ written underneath. His doorbell ring is the sound of a barking dog. But Bill doesn’t answer the door.

"He’s dead," is my first thought, because Bill is 80 years old, and that is the age people start falling over and hitting their heads and having strokes. Then I hear movement and my small friend appears, startled, in his boxer shorts. He’s putting his glasses on and blinking his lucid blue eyes. He thought our plans were for tomorrow and he was having a nap. With his bed-messed white hair and the round paunch that once-skinny men get when they get older, he reminds me of a toddler waking up. "I was going to make myself this tonight," he tells me, pointing to a hot dog defrosting on a plate. He’s told me about these great hot dogs he gets in a bulk-pack from ALDI. We decide that Bill will raincheck the hot dog and eat some takeaway with me instead.

Bill’s flat reminds me of my grandma’s: very neat and pink. He turns the lights down low and puts on his favourite CD, the pan-flute version of various love songs. Last time I was here, Bill led me in some Buddhist chanting that he’d learnt as a younger man, and we chanted over the top of (You’re Just Too good to be True) Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. Small crystal figurines are lit up in his glass cabinet, including a special cube, which spins gently, showing a hologram of Lee on each turn. But more about Lee later.

I order pizza while Bill goes to get dressed. When I first met him, Bill told me that while he was being scammed, he was so sad and stressed, he walked staring at the ground, never at the sky. Tonight, even though he is happy to be drinking wine with a friend, I can see his gaze is gravitating to his peach-coloured carpet and I get a very uncomfortable feeling.

"Bill, is something going on again? On the internet?" "Oh, don’t let’s talk about it, my dear. Let’s talk about you!"

Bill once let me read the emails he’d received when he was being scammed. They were bullying, pushy directives, all demanding money. I’d read through Bill’s responses, sometimes apologetic, sometimes furious, sometimes desperately sad, his old fingers typing in the flowery purple font he had chosen for his correspondence. He talked about suicide in those days, but the scammers didn’t relent.

I didn’t want Bill to get caught up in this again. Bill had finally been extricated from his scam when the (actual) Queensland police noticed the ‘suspicious’ transfers – an elderly Australian sending buckets of money to West Africa via Western union. The police knocked on Bill’s door and he told them everything. In response, they told him he’d been scammed. Bill’s only human contact for the year leading up to this had been with scammers. And then there they were, two real, live plainclothes cops, taking his hand and leading him out of his nightmare.

The first time I saw Bill was soon after that police visit, at his first victims of crime support group meeting. He stood as tall as he could and said in his unexpectedly deep voice, "I am a gay person . . . I went on the internet looking for companionship". He opened up to the roomful of people he had only just met. It was the first time he had told his story. Since then, Bill has helped other victims: I’d seen him in the paper and on TV warning people of the dangers of scams.

"Have you been to the support group recently?" I ask him now, sipping my wine.

"No, not for a while." "How come?"

"Well, I have to admit that there’ve been one or two people that I’ve been dealing with . . . and I feel that I’m dealing with genuine people."

He glances at the carpet. "People on the internet?"

"I know what they all say, but I’m not satisfied that these people are scammers."

Bill tells me that he is expecting some money to come to him soon. The alarm bells in my head make me want to shout: How are you letting this happen again?, but I don’t.

"Bill, you know that saying, you never get anything for free – what’s the saying again?"

"If it sounds too good to be true, it is not true," Bill says, before continuing, "I’ve sent a couple of money transfers away." I can’t work out whether his tone is defiant, guilty or resigned.

He explains that this is why he’s been staying away from the support group. "I feel that’s a betrayal. If I go there telling others 'Don’t deal with these people' and if I’m behind their back doing it . . . I can’t do one thing and say another."

I suspect that Bill’s been sending money for a while, because it’s clearly taking a toll on him. Some days, Bill tells me, he doesn’t even leave his flat. "I just sit in front of the computer all day and play FreeCell."

I have a feeling that, in between the FreeCell, he also compulsively reads through the emails. Years’ worth of correspondence, telling him that he’s about to come into a large sum of money, and then, just when it’s looking good, there’s a snag and Bill’s back to square one.

"But I expect to have something quite comforting by the end of this month," he concludes, with a glint in his eye.

This conversation is becoming hard for both of us. I decide to get us off the hook. I know what Bill will want to talk about.

Something that happened before he got old, before he tried internet dating, before he walked looking at the ground.

"Will you tell me about when you met Lee?"

And, suddenly, Bill isn’t old or sad any more. His face is playful and bright, as it was 20 years ago, after his wife died, after his children were adults, when he could finally be himself.

"Lee was a friend of a friend," Bill says. "He was so good-looking, I was afraid to talk to him. And it was only after he went back to Hong Kong that we started writing to each other."

Bill has forgotten about the scam. He’s forgotten about all his debts. He’s got no idea I’m going to the police tomorrow to ask them to put a lock on his Western Union account. He keeps talking.

He describes going to visit Lee for the first time in Hong Kong – how nervous he was, flying so far to meet a potential love. What if it all went terribly wrong? Bill describes Hong kong airport: "I came out with all the passengers, where a ramp was running down into the meeting hall. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, waiting. I stopped at the top of the ramp and looked down and I thought to myself, How on earth am I ever going to find Lee? I walked slowly forward – I can still see it – and as I did, he walked out of the crowd, up the ramp, to me. I could almost see Christ walking on the water, because that’s more or less what Lee did. He walked out of the ocean to me. If I close my eyes, I can almost see the lights of the meeting hall, the way it was."

Bill closes his eyes to remember the moment, and I look at a large photo of Lee, which has prime spot in the living room. Lee gazes out of the photo: a 30-year-old who looks 20, Chinese and spiky-haired, with a shy smile. "That’s the very first photo that I had of Lee and that’s what he looked like when I first met him. His face now is not all that much different." Bill smiles at Lee’s image.

Those days, staying in Hong Kong with Lee in a tiny apartment, were the best of Bill’s life. "I believe that I was sincerely in love."
And then something terrible happened. A phone call from Bill’s brother in Australia saying that Bill’s daughter, Fiona, had died. Bill screamed and Lee took the phone from him to discover Fiona’s heart had failed in the parking lot of a shopping centre. The next thing Bill remembers, he was on a plane. "The little darling," Bill says of his daughter, in her thirties when she died, "she was all alone." Fiona had been living in the family home while Bill was in Hong Kong with the love of his life.

After Fiona died, Bill returned home and never went back to live with Lee. He wouldn’t allow Lee to come and live in Australia with him either, as this would have been a sacrifice for Lee, whose family and work are in Hong Kong. Bill gave Lee his blessing to find someone new.

"So Lee has a partner now?"

"Yes," Bill says. "When Samuel came on the scene, Lee wouldn’t let him sleep in the bed. Because that was my side of the bed. Samuel had to sleep on the couch. I said I would look for somebody, but they would never replace Lee."

"And is he the same way?"

"Oh, I believe so. He phones me every week."

It’s hard to believe that Bill, still sincerely in love, went on the internet looking for someone new.

But even though he is always looking at us, from the hologram and the photos around the apartment, Lee, in fact, isn’t here. Bill is alone most of the time. And he was alone when he went on a site called silverDaddies, on which mature gay men can find younger guys. That’s where he met Miller Duncan and all his troubles began.

"Were you in love with Miller?"

"It wasn’t love, so much, it was hope. I was willing to give it a try," Bill says. "I just wanted someone to hold me."

Unchained Melody is playing on Bill’s pan-flute CD and even though it is instrumental, I find myself saying the lyrics in my head:

Oh, my love, my darling

I’ve hungered for your touch

A long, lonely time

This is an extract from You're Just Too Good To Be True by Sofija Stefanovic published by Penguin Books, $9.99, available as an ebook here.

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