Widow, 76, is forced to live in an RV after handing over $70,000 life savings to romance scammer who posed as Red Cross doctor working in Yemen and asked her to help buy their ‘forever’ home

An elderly widow is forced to live in an RV in North Carolina after losing her life savings to a romance scammer claiming to be a Red Cross doctor in Yemen.

Jennifer Dennis, 76, met a man who said his name was “Caleb” on Facebook and soon began an online relationship with him. Her husband, Richard Dennis, had passed away in 2020.

He claimed to be a Red Cross doctor working in Yemen and claimed he would return to the US soon.

After a few months, he suggested that the couple buy a house together in Cary, North Carolina, so they could start their lives together in a new place.

Caleb told Dennis that he had deposited $600,000 himself and asked Dennis to pay the rest. She transferred the money and ‘Caleb’ disappeared.

Dennis told ABC6, “He came back to the United States very quickly and wanted to settle in a new area because he had lost his wife.”

She didn’t think much about it before agreeing, as the pain of losing her husband has surrounded her for years.

The couple decided that Caleb would pay $600,000 for their new home and they would pay the remaining $70,000 that was still owed.

Dennis thought this seemed like the perfect deal, so she transferred $70,000 and then another $8,700 for other expenses.

After assuming it was a done deal, Dennis and her son Raymond Shollenbarger packed up all their belongings in Georgia and headed to their new home in Cray.

But when mother and son reached the address, they realized that people were already living in the house and that they had been scammed.

Dennis told the station: ‘I don’t know how he did it, but it all looked legit.

‘I’ve lost all that money and I don’t think I’ll ever get it back, and at 76 I don’t have much of a future.

‘When I noticed that someone was still living in the house and knocked on the door, I automatically knew it was a scam.

‘We had no place to go. We ended up sleeping in our car.

‘He sent me a picture of him – he was said to have been beaten up. That was the last time I heard from him.’

Someone from their church ended up lending them their RV to live in while Dennis and her son sorted out their situation.

But she’s not the only victim of a romance scam. A 69-year-old woman from California thought she had met the man of her dreams and was even planning to marry him, until she discovered that her husband-to-be was a 26-year-old con man from Nigeria.

Laura Francis told DailyMail.com in February 2023 that a man named David Hodge had contacted her on Facebook. The man told her he was an Army surgeon and was on a secret mission for the Marines in North Korea helping soldiers injured by explosives during the war.

He had told her that his ex-wife had cheated on him and after dating a younger woman, he was looking for someone more mature. Francis would get to know this mystery man over the coming months through text messages and on Google Hangouts.

A few weeks into their love affair, Hodge asked Francis for money. He told her he didn’t have access to his accounts, but assured her that once he was out of commission he would pay her back “every penny.”

He instructed her to send the money through Bitcoin apps: Coin Base and Coin Could Bitcoin ATMs.

The money she sent was part of her daughter’s inheritance. When she expressed her doubts and began to question his intentions, he sent her a bank statement from a bank in Ohio showing he had a balance of $3 million – which showed a Chase Bank PO box. He also showed her a Marine Corps employment contract and his passport, which she shared with DailyMail.com.

When Hodge told her he was falling in love with her and wanted to get married, Francis felt the butterflies too.

She would later learn the ugly truth that she was the victim of an online cryptocurrency scam in which two different scammers lost a whopping $250,000.

“It was all a lie,” she said. ‘They worked together. They put the whole scam together from scratch.”

She added: “It’s really painful because I really cared about the man. I was in love with David and I was devastated.’

Romance scams typically occur when a criminal adopts a false online identity to gain the victim’s affection and trust. The scammer then uses the illusion of a romantic or close relationship to manipulate and/or steal from the victim.

Almost in 2022 70,000 people reported being a victim of a romance scam and reported losses amounted to a shocking $1.3 billion.