Nigel Baker, a man notorious for his involvement in a romance fraud in the UK, has received a 17-year prison sentence. The man exploited divorced women to accumulate money which he then lost to gambling.
The Man Exploited Lonely Mothers for Money
Baker, a 56-years-old father of two, gained notoriety for posing as a prominent online sports betting operator to single mothers on dating apps. He swayed his victims with promises of a second chance at love, but his true intention was to defraud them.
Baker’s scheme ran from 2012 to 2020 and saw the man tell victims on dating apps to invest in his betting business, claiming a guaranteed return of investment. The man would even encourage women to take out loans or, in some cases, sell their property in order to invest. He told the women that this was all in order to build a bright shared future.
Estimates put the money Baker took at over GBP 900K. However, this money was not invested in a betting business, or at least not in the way his victims expected. In reality, Baker was a problem gambler who used single women’s money to fuel his gambling habit. One of his accounts had betting losses of some GBP 4 million, according to court documents.
When his claims for risk-free investments didn’t work, Baker resorted to claiming that he needed to buy food for his children, pay veterinary bills, or even pay money to a criminal gang he said was threatening him.
Baker to Serve a Prison Sentence
Authorities have so far identified five victims of Baker’s scheme. Since his arrest, however, additional women have claimed to have been defrauded by the man, suggesting that the money he took from his victims might be even higher than initially estimated.
In any case, the defense tried to attribute Baker’s problem gambling to PTSD caused by his involvement in a boat crash from 1989. However, the judge would have none of it and slammed Baker as a fraudster who ran a carefully calculated scheme rather than someone who acted impulsively due to a disorder.
The judge critiqued Baker for mercilessly discarding his victims once they had lost most of their money and sentenced him to 17 years in prison.