Beware! He Wants To Break Your Heart & Your Bank

ON A FROSTY JANUARY AFTERNOON, Lis Daugaard’s tummy fluttered as she waited in arrivals at the Copenhagen airport. Dressed in her best, the 65-year-old searched among the disembarking passengers for Robert Aleksander’s face.

- Eleanor Rose

They had met on a dating site and, after two months of exchanging emails and phone calls, this would be their first real-life encounter.

After the crowd thinned to nothing, Lis still stood there waiting. Where was the man from the photographs—grey-haired, handsome, with a shy smile? On her way home, the tears began to flow. “I had to call my daughter and say: ‘I think I’ve made a big mistake,’” she says.

Lis’s romance began on a popular Danish site, dating.dk, shortly after she retired back in 2013. Her husband had died 10 years earlier and until now she had been too busy raising four kids and pursuing an international career with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Leipzig, Germany, (living on the Continent for some years) to look for love. When she posted her profile, Robert Aleksander—who claimed to be an EU diplomat— pinged into her inbox almost immediately.

As the relationship blossomed, his emails became increasingly romantic. So when he said he needed a loan for travel, Lis didn’t hesitate. She wired him her savings of 94,000 krone (more than 10 lakhs), including the cost for a visit to her in Copenhagen. Now, when he failed to arrive, Lis was stunned. “How could a woman of my background, working all over Europe, get taken in like this?” she asks.

Police are worried about cases like Lis’s because many are carried out by international, organized crime gangs, operating behind the shield of a computer in Nigeria, Malaysia or Israel, far beyond the reach of local law enforcement. The Danish force issued a stark public warning, as have forces in Germany, France, Canada and the US. “The person you are communicating with is not necessarily the person they say they are,” Danish police told hopeful daters.