Woman scammed out of £25k after just three 10-minute dates with soldier she met on dating app

A woman was scammed out of £25,000 after three 10-minute dates with a man she met on a dating app.

Angela Whitbread, 45, was duped by guardsman Nathan Walker, who asked her to be a guarantor on several loans he was taking out.

The pair had met briefly three times before Walker had first asked for a loan of £50.

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The lending continued to grow with Whitbread eventually signing off as a guarantor for a loan to help Walker out of debt.

‘I've always been taught to help people out if they need it’

Speaking to Dermot O’Leary and Alison Hammond on This Morning, she said her friends had encouraged her to meet new people after she had been separated from her partner of seven years.

She matched with Walker, and the pair instantly hit it off.

"We swapped numbers and were chatting away. It was quite flattering coming out of a relationship," she said.

After the initial £50 loan Whitbread didn’t think much of it. She said: "I've always been taught to help people out if they need it and that's just what I was doing.”

Angela continued: "A few weeks later he actually sent me a link for a guarantor loan and he said 'I really need some help with it.

"This girlfriend, she's left me with loads of debt.' And, again, playing on my heartstrings with the little girl, he said 'Oh, I'm going to try and help her out.’

"He said, 'If you do this I promise I'll actually pay the loan and you won't have to pay anything. I will pay it all.'

"And I thought, surely this guy has got family, maybe he can ask his family? And he actually said to me that he didn't have any family, so then I agreed to be the guarantor.”

‘Didn’t even take you on a date?’

Dermot said: "It's interesting this because it's not like he said, 'Can you give me that £10,000?' he said, 'I need you to be the guarantor of the loan that I've already taken out'. So he transferred his debt back onto you. Did it go south after that?”

"Well, he made payments for this loan and another load for about £5,000," Angela replied.

He made them for about three months and then he stopped paying.

"And then I was getting slightly worried and he kept on saying, 'Oh, I can't afford it, I've got to pay this out for my daughter and stuff as maintenance.'

"So it kind of left me in a quandary. I needed to pay this money but I also needed to keep a roof over my head and pay all of my bills at the same time. So it was very stressful.”

Gobsmacked, Alison asked: “Did he even take you on a date?”

"No," Angela replied. "I met him three times and all three times were for a maximum of ten minutes.”

"Oh Angela, I feel so sorry for you," Alison added.

Tragically for Angela, despite Walker being convicted of fraud, she still has to pay the loan back and has been forced to take out further loans to keep the bailiffs away.

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