This programme contains strong language
I think everyone that's dating is looking for love.
It's like the fairy tale that us young girls dream of.
He had a nice house.
Jewellery.
The Bentley.
It's not every day you come into contact with an eccentric lord.
But it was all smoke and mirrors.
We were groomed as a family.
Was I just...
...another business transaction to him?
Every single time we talked,
he would have a story...
...which was more bizarre than the last.
The whole situation, it'd gone from a fairy tale...
...to a horror.
I think I'm very lucky to live on the Isle of Wight.
It's a beautiful place.
It's a very small town, everybody knows everybody,
but it's a lovely place to live.
I don't think I've ever really had a type.
Someone that can make me laugh,
a nice smile, nice eyes - I'm happy with that.
Me and Megan are really close.
She's my middle child.
She was my first little girl.
I speak to her all the time,
share all her trials and tribulations.
She's fantastic.
Back in 2017, I was approached
and asked if I wanted to open up a bar.
I'd been in managing roles in restaurants before,
but this was a new opportunity.
So we took over a run-down older bar
and turned it into a very trendy cocktail bar,
and it was doing really well.
I've always had a very close-knit group of girlfriends.
At the time, I was the only one that had my own place,
so they'd all lived with me at some point.
They were there every weekend.
They were there all the time.
We were so young and carefree.
We were doing something every night.
UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS
Dinner, drinks.
I was stood at the end of the bar doing shots while she was working.
I was like...
We were living life.
Living life as a pair of young 20-year-olds, really.
SHE LAUGHS
I cannot tell you how amazing Megan is.
She's like a friend, a sister, a therapist.
She's like everything just wrapped into one person.
She's... She's unbelievable.
I'd been single for about two years at this point,
but I was very much enjoying the dating scene,
going out on lots of dinner dates and meeting lots of new people.
Megan was a serial dater.
SHE LAUGHS
But I was fully for supporting her.
It would be easy to say you were looking for love,
but then, obviously, everybody wants that.
I was working in the bar.
It was the middle of the week.
It was very quiet.
I remember clocking him as he came in.
He's quite tall, very well dressed.
Not the kind of person you'd see around Shanklin
on a day-to-day basis.
The day that he came in, we were talking quite a lot.
Obviously, it was a new person, new face around the town.
He introduced himself as Bertie Underwood.
He was very well-to-do.
Very, very well-spoken, very polite, very well-mannered.
He was an interesting character to get to know.
He'd just moved to the island from the mainland.
He was a horologist, which I didn't know at the time,
but that's, like, working with watches.
He'd just bought this house with a sea view.
He did stick out like a sore thumb on the Isle of Wight.
Absolutely everybody, within a few months or weeks, knew who he was.
I first heard about Bertie when a massive bunch of flowers
randomly arrived at the bar.
There was a note saying, "It was lovely to meet you.
"Be ready for 7pm tonight.
"I'm taking you on a date."
It definitely did feel like, you know,
what they do in the movies.
Megan was just bouncing off the walls.
It is so unheard of nowadays.
People just send you a text, don't they?
"Want to go for a date?"
The girls came over to my flat to help me get ready.
And then he picked me up from outside the bar at about seven.
From the start, there was, like, a big initial attraction.
We went to The Royal in Ventnor,
the nicest place you could go for dinner.
I was only 20 at the time.
I'd never quite had that treatment before.
It definitely was a lot nicer than a lot of other first dates.
There was something there between us,
but I wasn't going to make the first move.
After dinner, he invited me back to his place for a cup of tea.
Erm...
And it was just a cup of tea.
It was an absolutely beautiful three-storey house.
There was beautiful paintings on the wall,
there were lots of stories about how he'd bought it at auction,
it was really run-down,
and he had lots of stories about where everything had come from
and the whole timeline on how he'd renovated the place.
He did tell me that he's actually a lord,
passed down from his grandad.
Never met a lord before, so I had absolutely no idea.
He had this antique poster of an Underwood typewriter
framed on the wall.
His great great-grandfather had invented the Underwood typewriter,
and that's where his name and his money had come from.
He dropped me back home to my flat after the tea.
We did share a little kiss in the car on the way back.
There were lots of butterflies.
It was very exciting.
The whole experience was wonderful.
It was one of the best first dates that I've ever had.
I was like a giddy child.
She was really excited.
Like, "This man is so nice."
Like, "He's really well-spoken. He treats me well."
It was someone that she'd want to take home to her family.
She was so ecstatic about it.
Like, buzzing.
The early days with Bertie were amazing.
We were going away all of the time, in London...
He was like no other relationship I've been in.
Bertie used to go off the island quite often for work.
He did always used to bring gifts back,
which was very nice - perfume, clothes, shoes,
lots of Harrods gift bags over the time.
Even when it was sad that he'd have to go away for work,
he would always make up for it with coming back with gifts.
He bought me a car.
Honestly, never thought that I would have a car like that.
It was the dream.
Driving around in nice cars,
wearing the beautiful jewellery.
It's like, "Babe, you've got it all."
My family loved him.
Everything did move very fast.
He offered for me to move in with him.
Which, at the time, was a huge deal for me
because I'd never lived with a partner before.
This is definitely the nicest house I've ever lived in.
We did get pictures of us printed off together
to put in frames around the house,
just to make it feel a bit more ours
and a bit more homely, which was sweet.
That was actually his idea.
Over dinner one day he did say, "I love you."
I felt on top of the world.
I think I obviously knew long before he'd actually told me
that I did love him.
But, yeah, it all just happened quite naturally.
It really did feel like a dream come true.
In 2016, I was living in Hastings.
I'm always happy.
I was going out, enjoying life,
and I was at work at the supermarket.
This guy comes over to me and said to me,
"Hi, my name's Robert and, um, how are you, Mike?"
He had a posh spoken voice.
He was smart, casually dressed.
And I said, "Who are you?" Type of thing.
And then he said...
He said, "Well, we've been chatting on Grindr."
I'd been passing photos and getting friendly and all that sort of thing.
And we became friends.
I hadn't got a clue
he's a fraudster.
Me and Bertie went out a couple of times.
We went to a pub once,
and then on another occasion, we went to Brighton.
We were looking in art galleries and he was spending money
on quite expensive stuff, lots of money.
It was like living the high life.
He told me he was a lord.
Because of the way he dressed,
his mannerism, the little bits of eccentricity and all that.
It's not every day you come into contact with an eccentric lord.
We knew each other's ins and outs and such as friends.
And I'd been to his flat.
He'd cooked me dinner, and we'd gone out socially and all that.
And one particular occasion,
we were having a few drinks and just having a laugh and a joke,
he said to me, "I've got a friend who was coming with me
"on holiday to Venice who can't come."
He said, "But the tickets are all bought and paid for."
So he said, "This is a bit presumptuous of me."
He said, "Would you like to come?"
I said, "Well, I've never been to Venice before."
He said, "All I have to do is change the documentation into your name,"
which he did there and then in front of me.
He said, "But I need a copy of your passport."
So he took a screenshot of my passport
and he uploaded it, and he sent it off.
I didn't think much of it.
On another visit he said to me,
"Oh, I've got a problem.
"My eBay account has just been frozen."
He said, "Would you consider selling something on my behalf?"
He said he needed to sell a Rolex watch, so I agreed.
He sold this watch through my eBay account.
Everything was hunky dory.
About a month afterwards is
when I got my first message from a gentleman.
Ooh, shit hit the fan.
I was getting messages left, right and centre
from different people saying I was taking their money.
But we're not talking hundreds,
we're talking thousands.
They were all sending me pictures of the same Rolex watch
that they'd actually bought.
When I realised, I contacted eBay and said what was happening.
The start of the scam was he needed a document to prove who I was.
He used my screenshot of my passport to then send to everyone
to prove that I was a genuine person.
I confronted him.
I said, "Look, what are you going to do about it?"
He said, "Leave it with me, I'll sort it."
I never saw him after that.
That was the last time I actually set eyes on him.
This was the most fast-paced relationship I'd ever been in.
Our first Christmas together,
we were just sat on the sofa having a drink.
He turned around and said he had one more present left for me
and pulled out this very nice red Cartier bag,
got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
I was absolutely blown away, like, the ring was stunning.
It was impressive,
I'm not going to lie.
All of a sudden, they're engaged.
I was shocked.
It hadn't been long.
I did say to Megan, like,
"Are you sure this is what you want? It's a bit soon."
She was so in the moment.
Happy, excited.
Like, "This is what I want for myself. This is my life now."
Almost like the fairy tale relationship
that us young girls dream of.
It hadn't been long that they'd been in a relationship together,
but they both seemed really happy.
So I was happy.
Bertie was very much part of the family.
We did get planning straight away.
It was most definitely a no-expense-spared wedding.
I'd think to myself, "Is this what it's like marrying a lord?"
Bertie used to say often, you know,
that I would gain a title from marrying him.
It was quite a surreal experience.
I wanted to show off our relationship and what we were doing
and all these amazing places we were going,
and my handsome boyfriend, like,
why would I not want to show him off?
But Bertie did not allow me to post any photos of him on social media.
And I said, well,
"Why am I not allowed to post you on social media?"
He completely lost his head.
Which was quite a shock to me.
I couldn't understand why it was so serious and important to him.
You know, like the odd story on Instagram, out for lunch.
Why would that be the end of the world?
As Megan's and Bertie's relationship started to develop,
it was so noticeable how less and less in communication
me and Megan were.
Our friendship definitely changed at this point.
I started to think that perhaps Bertie was trying
to get Megan to drift away from her friends
and almost mould her into someone that she wasn't.
Almost to start manipulating her.
An issue that started occurring lots within our relationship was the bar.
After I'd moved in with him,
he just wasn't very happy about me being there so late.
He didn't like that people knew me and men wanted to talk to me,
so that was always a bit of a sore subject.
The bar was like my baby.
I was very proud of the bar and leaving was really sad.
But I did.
And I went to work for him.
That did ring alarm bells.
It made me feel quite uncomfortable
because she would then be completely dependent on Bertie -
financially as well as everything else.
I used to take photos of the watches and I used to upload them,
and I used to send emails and make all the social media content.
He had a little workshop set up coming off of the lounge.
He used to sit there in the evening
with his little head torch on, fixing watches.
I used to sit there and watch him with a glass of red wine and think,
"Gosh, you're so clever."
One day Bertie decided to get a puppy for when he's working away
and I get a bit of company.
We named our Chihuahua Schubert, which was Bertie's choice of name.
Schubs.
He's not scared of it, is he?
He was very, very cute,
a little bit naughty,
and spent the whole of his life sat on my chest, curled up.
But he was, yeah, like the most perfect little puppy.
BIRD TWEETS Ooh!
We were like this little family.
It was amazing.
Bertie had a friend called Alex,
who I believed to be an artist.
At the time, he was living abroad.
They would speak on the phone on quite a regular basis.
I'm from Brighton originally.
Primarily, I make installation work,
anything from illustration
to film-making, some writing.
But the thing which kind of characterises all of it
is that it always involves a story.
And Bertie had absolutely set the scene for a brilliant story.
In the winter of 2016,
I was living in Korea.
I was isolated quite a lot of the time.
Erm, I mean, I had a lot of great friends and everything,
but the thing is, I worked for myself.
I had my own public art studio,
which was on the top of a mountain.
It was a little bit out of the way.
I wanted to get back to the UK and do something
about British culture.
I had this crazy idea.
I went on Craigslist back when it still used to allow
personal ads, and I basically just wrote a personal ad
with pretty much a shopping list of all of the things
that I would want in someone that I was going to date.
And I just kind of shot it out into the aether,
not really expecting anything to come back, if I'm honest.
About a month later,
I had this email which was answering
the Craigslist ad.
It was clear that they had a way with words.
It was clear that they were able to endear you to them.
And that's how I first met Bertie.
When Bertie did kind of come into my life
and did phone me a lot, you know,
we would chat about kind of anything and everything.
And every single time we talked,
he would have a story which was more bizarre than the last.
I think I said that he looked younger than 29.
He launched almost directly into the story about
how actually the reason why he looked younger was
because he had had his face surgically reconstructed.
He said it was because his ex-boyfriend had locked him
in their apartment and tried to kill him, basically.
MUFFLED BANGING
It was the mad stories about the ex who is on the run from the police.
His mum...
...beat this woman so thoroughly in the face
that one of the rubies in her ring got dislodged
and lodged into the woman's face,
and his mum knocked two of this woman's teeth out.
His stories were very entertaining, but they were also very dark.
There were a lot of discussions
about what we would want in a relationship.
But it became clear that
that was not something that I would want.
I arrived back jet-lagged.
Then he kind of steps up contact a little bit,
and he's asking, OK, well, let's go out and have a pint.
We were walking up the hill and there's this Bentley.
He said, "Yep, this is my car."
So then I was like, "OK, wow."
HE LAUGHS
And then he turned to me and he said, "I'm an earl."
Then we went to the next bar and he...
That's when he started talking about his bodyguard and his driver.
Got the Bentley, we've got the posh clothes,
we've got the accent.
Erm, and now we've got a driver and a bodyguard.
So at this point, you know, all the things are stacking up.
He began hinting quite early
that he wanted to commission an artwork from me.
He told me that he had met a girl on the Isle of Wight,
and that she was a bit of a diamond in the rough kind of thing.
He was buying a mansion on the Isle of Wight
for them to move into that he would need artwork for.
Bertie had introduced me over the phone to Alex.
Alex had an invite to the wedding, so we...
We did speak to him on a regular basis.
He never told me that they were engaged.
None of that.
Bertie decided that he wanted to get married
and have everything at Osborne House.
You know, we went there for a few meetings.
We had everything set in stone.
We had the date.
Wedding planning was in full swing.
Beautiful.
It was quite emotional to see Megan in a wedding dress.
You bring your daughter up from a baby,
and all of a sudden, they're a grown woman in a wedding shop.
One of the most powerful things that Bertie did to convince you
was he would answer the phone in front of you,
talking to someone else who would corroborate the stories
that he was giving you.
PHONE RINGS
He used to answer the phone to his dad all the time.
And I could hear the conversations between him and his dad,
and they were talking about him being an earl
and his duties as an earl.
Those were the things which really made his story believable,
because he can tell me whatever he wants, that's fine.
But to get other people involved in telling me the same thing,
that's much more difficult to do.
My friendship with Bertie started to take a sinister turn.
He wanted me to doctor bank statements, passports.
I told him no.
So he became more and more distant
until eventually, he just disappeared.
I still wanted to know who he was and what he was.
He used to pretend that he knew people that I knew.
And one day, it just clicked.
I could get in contact with this person that he said that he knew.
Just to see if he did or not.
So I phoned up this person and I said to him,
"Look, this is going to sound really weird,
"but I met this guy in Brighton
"and he told me that he was an earl."
And then the phone went really quiet.
And this guy, this police officer, he said, "Alex...
"This guy, he's really dangerous.
"And you need to get as far away from him as you can."
I hadn't been living with Bertie very long
before I realised that we were getting a hell of a lot of post
for someone that didn't live there.
That was post every day for this person.
I mentioned it lots of times to Bertie.
I didn't get any answers from him.
So, being curious, I did decide to...
...maybe do some digging.
I don't know.
I felt like I needed to try
and get an understanding of what was happening.
So I went into his office.
And I started going through the drawers.
I don't really know what I was expecting to find.
I did, however, find a wallet with numerous different bank cards
in multiple different names...
...none of which in his wallet were Bertie Underwood.
I did ask Bertie about these cards.
His attitude changed instantly.
He shut it down quite quickly,
got very defensive and irate.
My heart was racing.
My palms were sweaty.
It's definitely when I started questioning everything.
I spoke to her on the phone.
I was like, "Just get out of there. Come here. Let's regroup.
"Let's get you sorted. We'll talk about it."
Something wasn't right,
so we done what anyone would do and started googling the names
from the bank cards and the letters that were arriving to the house
from the old tenants.
Honestly, I was shocked.
His mugshot came up everywhere.
He was on multiple news articles.
Wanted pages for jewellers warning you against this con man.
He'd conned Bentley dealers.
He'd conned Harrods for half a million.
Just absolutely insane.
If he's capable of doing that,
what could he have possibly done to me?
I instantly felt sick.
This guy from a council estate in Hastings,
he's been pretending to be a member of nobility...
...by putting on an accent and wearing certain clothes
and robbing a bank.
My stomach just dropped.
This was the man that my daughter was going to marry.
He'd duped all of us.
We were groomed as a family.
Then the letters started to arrive.
Credit cards and loans in Megan's name
that she knew absolutely nothing about.
And they just kept coming and coming and coming.
Between different credit cards, a car, phone bills,
business accounts, business credit cards.
He'd taken out all of these things in my name without me knowing.
Around £30,000.
We went to the police and we went to Action Fraud.
Erm, unfortunately, there wasn't really a great deal
that they could do.
Lots of things like the car and the phone
and some other bits and bobs were seen as domestic issues
rather than fraudulent issues
because we were in a relationship.
So I just had to bite the bullet and start paying off the debt.
He told me that he'd left the island,
but he came over to talk to me.
He told me that he did love me and that it was different,
and that he didn't mean to take anything this far.
That was the last time I saw him in person.
I did say to Mum,
"Whatever he has done,
"we have the engagement ring.
"We'll be fine." Like, "We'll sell the ring.
"We'll clear it. That should cover it."
"We'll do this. We'll get it valued.
"We'll find the best way of selling it
"and we'll start clearing these debts."
We took them to a jewellers in Ryde.
Tested them.
And they were all fake.
Shocked.
Like really shocked, actually,
but also not surprised.
That left her with absolutely nothing.
I realised, OK, I really might be in the shit now
and I could be in some big trouble.
Not only had put all of my trust and my whole life into this man
that I loved and thought I was going to marry...
Why am I getting emotional?
SHE SNIFFLES
I think maybe just going over it all again...
Like, it was a pretty crazy experience.
I had to speak to Megan.
"We need to do something about this.
"Let's tell the story
"and let's get his face out there."
Basically, if I could make his life uncomfortable for one second,
it was all going to be worth it.
And that's what we did.
We sat down, we wrote the post,
we read it through together,
and I posted it, and I posted it
in as many places as I possibly could.
And before I knew it, people started sharing it.
It had 500 shares and 1,000 shares,
2,000 shares. And it just escalated.
I had message after message after message.
I came across this post and I just remember it
detailing all of these horrible things that Bertie had done.
And it wasn't just that -
there were all of these comments from other people
who had also had things stolen and damaged
and had their lives really hurt by Bertie.
One of my colleagues, she said,
"Mike, I think you need to read this."
Some of these people he duped into getting
their private bank accounts,
he got in to having their bank cards.
And that really set me off -
to think that he'd actually got to people,
some people sexually through Grindr and social sites.
I reached out to some of these people.
And I just went, "Right.
"I'm not letting this person get away with what he's done.
"I'm going to get this person put behind bars."
I had multiple men contact me on Facebook
to tell me that they had been sleeping with him.
Not only was he cheating on me,
he was doing it in my bed - with men.
This, like, whole person that was my world,
like, was never a real person.
None of it was real.
SHE CLEARS THROAT
It really broke my heart to see her that upset.
She changed her whole world for this man.
I contacted the police.
We built a case between the people that had got involved
and given evidence.
There was enough evidence to take it via a jury.
He was found guilty in his absence.
The judge handed down a sentence of five years.
He'd actually done this before, been convicted of it,
done time in prison for it.
He'd come out, he'd just picked up where he'd left off.
About a year and a half down the line,
I'd moved on with my life.
I had a Facebook message from somebody.
He contacted me to let me know that Bertie had been arrested.
Something that has disturbed me ever since was that Bertie was using
my career and my website to corroborate the stories
he was making up with new people that he was meeting.
That's the cleverest thing that he was able to do,
to manipulate other people to tell his story so that he didn't have to.
And when you're hearing it from a third party,
it's more convincing.
He must have never had any intentions of marrying me.
I obviously had to contact suppliers and cancel things.
I am very angry.
I, you know, wasted the first two years of my twenties
on absolutely nothing...
...other than a load of debt.
Once Megan found out about all of this debt, she...
She worked her arse off to clear it.
I had been dabbling in photography
towards the end of the relationship with Bertie.
I borrowed a friend's camera,
and I'd just sort of been having some fun with it.
Photographing friends, children and things like that.
Erm, completely unintentionally,
it just happened to turn into a business.
Which, you know, couldn't have come at a better time.
She's had to rebuild her life.
She's had to work incredibly hard to pay off the debts
that were accumulated.
Very, very proud of Megan.
Yeah, I'm very excited for her future as well.
My life has changed so dramatically since I was with him,
and I've been in a new relationship and I have my home,
I have my mortgage, I have my business.
My life is exactly what I wanted when I was with him.
He had walked out of an open prison where he was serving his sentence.
Currently wanted by the police.
How do you get away with that?
He didn't even do his sentence.
SHE SCOFFS
You couldn't write it.
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