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Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells is not amused - and in this case it is no mere figure of speech.

Sitting at home in the Regency spa town famous for its Jaeger-clad Hyacinths and Daphnes, Caroline Gates-Fleming can only laugh at the irony.

‘I am one of them, really,’ she says, dabbing gingerly at the tender scars of a recent facelift.
‘Middle-class, middle-aged, respectable. I was brought up nicely and married well. Our boys went to public school.

‘But after what I’ve been through, I know they’d find me unacceptable around here. Things like this don’t happen to women like me.’

She has a point. For in Caroline’s case, ‘things like this’ means dabbling in fraud and embracing folly on such an epic scale that even her close family struggles to comprehend.

‘Everyone asks how could I have been so stupid,’ she sighs. ‘I got more than I bargained for.’

How could she fall in love with a foreigner on the internet and then, despite his many and obvious lies, entrust him with £40,000, money she will never see again?

In fairness, Caroline, now 54, has the honesty and intelligence to talk about her motives and the loneliness which is at the root of her current predicament.

Similar to many women of her age, with two failed marriages behind her, she badly wanted the comfort of a relationship.


‘What woman doesn’t worry about growing older?’ she asks. ‘It’s not just about looks. Confidence evaporates. Builders no longer wolf-whistle. When you have always attracted men, invisibility hits hard.

'It’s in the genes: my late mother Pauline was always glamorous. I won’t even pop to the shops without full make-up.’

As a young woman, Caroline had worked as a jobbing stage actress and dancer, and all that theatrical attention, she admits, had made her rather vain. Later in life, she turned her hand to property development, buying, renovating and selling cottages with some success.

‘Coming to terms with ageing is my problem. I need reassurance from a man,’ she says. ‘I was unhappy alone, and shattered by having brought up three boys.

‘Marcus, my first husband and father of Piers, my eldest [now 24], was long gone. Peter, my second husband, father of Rupert and Theo [19 and 18] had little to do with us.’

Craving a fresh start, in 2002 she moved to Marbella in Spain, where, rather romantically, she thought she might meet a new partner.

‘I still craved that special someone to say, “Want a cup of tea? Let’s have a cuddle,” ’ she says. ‘It is not about sex, but togetherness.’

But she never really settled and returned to Britain after four years, depression having kicked in, and in need of a job.

If glamour has always been a watchword for Caroline, she was still not too proud to take on ‘unattractive’ jobs and found work as a full-time carer for people with learning disabilities.

Her stores of confidence, though, were dwindling. ‘I was still alone, still desperately unhappy,’ she says.

‘I wanted to be flattered and taken out. But it’s so much harder to meet men when you are older. My girlfriends were all married. I had to do something. I’m not the kind to wait for things to happen.

‘They say you learn from your mistakes, but I’ve made the same mistakes with the same kind of men my entire life.’

So when, in August last year, Caroline came across Match.com, a high-profile dating website, the temptation to sign up was overwhelming. It felt safe and respectable, she says, and, after all, ‘you had to pay’ to join.


At first she was conservative, making sure her meetings took place in coffee bars during the daytime, but she soon found that her ‘dates’ were on the cautious side, too.

‘There was never that spark,’ she explains, flicking at the pink tips of her bleached blonde crop.

‘I began to find men my age too old for me. I don’t feel like a woman in her 50s. I fight it. I’ve had a gastric band and a facelift.’

Then she came across a man she calls Sab, who seemed so very different from the run-of-the-mill men she had been meeting.

‘Of course, his name is really Steve,’ she says, of the man she now understands is a Nigerian called Stephen Ehiamhen.

‘I call him Sab because, when he first advertised on the site, he called himself Sabastine Roland. He used a fake picture and posed as a Greek, claiming to be an entrepreneur in Nigeria.’

Caroline accepts that even the earliest signs were dubious.

‘He was vague about his age,’ she says. ‘First it was 47, then 37. He told me that when he applied for a visa to travel to South Africa, he had been advised to say 27 so that he could make out he was a student going to
the World Cup.

‘After two emails, he phoned. I knew the moment I heard him that he wasn’t Greek.’
In fact, while ‘Sab’s’ English was limited, he most certainly did not speak the language of Sophocles, preferring a version of pidgin laced with dialect and slang that is widely spoken in Nigeria.

‘I challenged him about it but he laughed,’ says Caroline. For all his obvious lies, she found him attractive. ‘We messaged and emailed every day.
'He soon said he was falling in love with me and I began to feel the same. I found it hard to explain to my sons that I was falling for someone I’d never met.

'Strangely, though, you communicate at a very intense level when it’s not face-to-face.
‘Sab is a direct, articulate person.

'He said he goes to church every Sunday and that his faith is strong. He said we were fated to meet.

‘When he first emailed that he loved me, a month after our initial encounter, I wrote, “Don’t go there.” I was terrified of the intensity of my feelings towards him.’

Caroline was well aware that much of ‘Sab’s’ story was invented, yet it was only after two months of passionate conversation that the two of them spoke seriously about his identity.

‘He confessed he was not who he’d said he was, that he couldn’t do it to me any more, that he “hadn’t planned on the emotion”, as he put it.’

He had to come clean. Hearing that he was really a black Nigerian came as no shock - his pidgin English and African-style dialect had given Caroline a major clue.

She says: ‘He said he was desperate to do something with his life, that he’d been looking for money to get into oil.’