My Online Nightmare

This first episode examines astonishing cases of sex fraud. Megan was 15 when she began dating 17-year-old Chris. They had frequent sex but always with the curtains drawn and Megan unable to touch him. The shocking truth soon came out: Chris was in fact 26-year-old Christine, who had, since childhood, identified as male. Marissa was a troubled 19-year-old growing up in Alabama with her aunt Patra. They fell out over Marissa repeatedly talking to strangers online. To spy on her, Patra posed online as handsome older man 'Tre,' and started chatting to her niece. Things took a horrifying turn when Marissa asked Tre to kidnap and kill her aunt.

This second episode looks at stories of romances that went disastrously wrong, beginning as whirlwind romances filled with promise but ending in deception, fraud and even bigamy. Liz, a doctor from Newcastle, met dashing barrister Chris on a dating website. They moved into a grand flat together in the grounds of a stately home in Northumberland, but that was the start of Chris's lengthy and elaborate scam, which left Liz penniless and her life in tatters. Meanwhile, William Allen Jordan committed some of the worst love frauds in history. He gained worldwide notoriety after he pretended to be a CIA agent so that he could defraud vulnerable women who were looking for love in Britain, and went on to have 13 children with eight different women in the UK and America.

Kurt and his new girlfriend were contacted repeatedly on Facebook with abusive messages by a mysterious woman called Suzie. One evening Kurt was violently stabbed by two masked men and narrowly escaped with his life. The attackers were hired by Luigi Dalli, after he had plotted a contract killing on Kurt, for starting a relationship with his ex. They had agreed to kill Kurt for £500 each. Meanwhile, CBS news anchor Erika von Tiehl was terrified when she received abusive anonymous texts. The cyberstalking escalated to identity theft and murder threats. Eventually police arrested serial stalker John Hart, who Erica had dated and who became obsessed with her after she dumped him.

This episode tells three extraordinary stories of women targeted by con artists and defrauded out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Single mum Annie Ruddock met Matthew Samuels through an online dating site in January 2013. He not only conned Annie out of most of her £80,000 inheritance, but left four other women and a man bereft of £180,000 over three years and fathered ten children. Joe and Keith Barnett were cruelly conned out of thousands of pounds when surrogate Louise Pollard dashed their hopes of having a child, turning out to be a duplicitous, cunning, and a manipulative fraud. And university professor Judith fell in love with totally fictitious John, who fooled her into handing over £140,000. She became the victim of a sophisticated online fraud which has left her not only emotionally devastated but with a very uncertain financial future.