Gill Casey’s hands tremble slightly as she adjusts her pink cardigan.
At 77, she has the neat appearance of someone who has always taken pride in her presentation – short, grey hair perfectly styled, modest jewellery catching the light. But there’s a fragility about her now, a woman rocked by circumstances.
Three years ago, Gill and her husband Tim were living the retirement they had carefully planned for decades. Today, she counts every penny and lives alone in their home in Launceston, Cornwall, with just her dog and two cats for company.
The man she was married to for 45 years died last December, aged 85, and Gill is convinced the stress of losing their life savings to cryptocurrency scammers killed him.
‘It’s been catastrophic,’ she says. ‘Not just financially. Emotionally, physically. For Tim… it destroyed him.’
‘He was robbed of more than money. He was robbed of his dignity, his self-esteem, his self-confidence. The scam diminished him, and I truly believe it contributed to his death.’
So close: Gill and Tim Casey in happier times. Tim, who served with the RAF for 20 years as a flight engineer, died last December aged 85
Tim and Gill met through a friend in London in 1979, when he was on a trip home from Hong Kong, where he worked for Cathay Pacific, after serving with the RAF for 20 years, as a flight engineer.
The connection was immediate. ‘He asked me to marry him after four days,’ says Gill. She met him in August, moved out to Hong Kong just after Christmas, and they married the following April. Tim was 40, Gill was 31.
‘He worked hard,’ she says. ‘We weren’t reckless; we built up a nest egg.’
When Tim retired in 1994, at the age of 55, he received a lump sum pension payout. The couple returned to the UK and bought a seven-bedroom country hotel with en-suite facilities in Ashwater, Devon. They owned the property for about ten years before selling it in 2001.
‘We ran it for about seven or eight years,’ says Gill, showing me photographs of a younger, happier time. In one wedding photo, Tim is a tall, broad-shouldered man with the bearing of someone who spent decades in the military.
She says: ‘He was always very strong – big guy, military background. Even at 80, he had good upper-body strength.’
When they moved into their three-bedroom home in Launceston, they had savings, a comfortable house and decades of shared memories.
Gill has one daughter from a previous marriage, while Tim had a son in Australia and two grandchildren.
The scam that would destroy their peace began in February 2022 when Tim saw a fake clip on Facebook.
‘I think it was Martin Lewis on Good Morning Britain, the ITV morning breakfast show,’ Gill says. ‘And he appeared to be recommending an investment company called Terra-Markets.’
The scammers were pointing people to a website they had created, called Terra-Markets, deliberately similar to a real Norwegian company called Terra Markets.
‘On the clip they told people to make sure to use the hyphen,’ says Gill. ‘When you look up Terra Markets, you can find the real company, an Oslo-based company, but this company had the hyphen in it.’
The advert said: ‘Give me £250 and by the end of this interview, I’ll have made you money.’
She knows now that the fraudsters’ advert was one of those that featured fake comments, seemingly from MoneySavingExpert founder and TV show host Mr Lewis, to lure in victims.
Mr Lewis has spoken out about these in the past and Money Mail has warned of similar scams using him and other celebrities.
Believing it was real, Tim filled out a contact form on the fake website. Within hours he received a call from what looked like a London number.
His assigned ‘account manager’ introduced himself as Jacob Martin, speaking with what sounded like an American accent.
Jacob said he was based in Switzerland and was calling on a Swiss number. He promised to help Tim invest in Bitcoin.
Tim started with what seemed like a modest investment of £500. Initially Gill was not worried but then the money paid in escalated. ‘It went from £500 to £1,000 to £5,000 to £10,000, and it just kept going up like that,’ she says.
The criminals had created a website that Tim logged on to that appeared to show his account and the profits he was making.
Gill says: ‘He’d wake up every morning and couldn’t wait to check his computer to see how much was in his account. You’ve got this ticking box showing you that your £20,000 was now worth £80,000.’
The money came from Tim’s pension lump sum, which he had put into Premium Bonds. He moved it from there into his NatWest account and then transferred it.
Tim never bought the Bitcoin himself but sent money to the scammers, who claimed to be investing in cryptocurrency for him.
He spoke to multiple people at the supposed investment firm. Besides Jacob, there was ‘a Dutch guy who was supposedly Jacob’s boss, and a German guy who was supposedly the accountant,’ says Gill. ‘If you were losing confidence in one, somebody else comes in on the act. Somebody more senior.
‘They had Swiss numbers and a London number you could leave a message on, and they got back to you really quickly.’
Gill could hear lengthy conversations from the kitchen or living room while Tim spoke in his office. They kept contact via emails, text messages and phone calls.
She says: ‘They were on the phone every other day, just brainwashing on a massive scale. And then at the end of that brainwashing session, that would be another £5,000 transferred to them.’
The manipulation included flattery, such as saying: ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Gill tried to intervene. She says: ‘I was very sceptical about the whole thing, and I did start saying things.
‘But every time I questioned it, I just got batted away. He’d say: “No, no, I’m the one talking to them, I know they’re all right.” He just was so taken in by it all. I wish I’d said more. Shouted louder.
‘I asked to speak to these people myself but any question I’d ask, about how they were making their money, would be brushed off with: “Don’t worry about that.” ’
She started looking up names by the scammers mentioned online, but they had used some connected to real people in the crypto industry to provide a veneer of legitimacy.
By the time the scam was complete, Tim had put in £90,000 and supposedly had about £230,000 in his account. This was in June 2022, four months after the scammers were first in touch.
The first sign of the scam unravelling came when Tim said he had run out of money and wanted to take out his cash.
The scammers claimed he needed to pay £30,000 in tax to access his supposed profits. Tim didn’t have the money.
Tactics: The scammers created fake websites to trick Mr Casey into investing money he had taken from his pension – feeding him false accounts about profits he had supposedly made
She says: ‘I asked him why they couldn’t use the money from his investments to pay it, but he asked them and they said they couldn’t do that, it was against regulations. He asked me if he should borrow it from a family member and I said he shouldn’t do that. But he did anyway.’
Even after paying the supposed tax money, Tim could not access his funds. Gill says: ‘He came into me in the kitchen and said, “Now they say we’ve got to pay whatever – £25,000 commission or something. I better ask somebody else to borrow some more money.” I said: “No, you’re crazy. You cannot do that.”
‘That’s the moment it dawned on him. He looked at me and said: “Have we lost all this money?”
‘I said: “Yes, it’s gone.” That’s when it sunk in, the realisation of what had happened. He went white and his mouth fell open.’
The man who had created a comfortable retirement through decades of hard work, was faced with the truth that he had given everything to criminals. Life savings of £120,000 had gone.
After that, Tim changed. ‘It stole all of his self-esteem,’ says Gill. ‘He just went so quiet, into himself. He was completely devastated. I think it was just playing on his mind constantly. I don’t think he was sleeping very well at night, so he’d sleep a lot in the day.
‘He used to have people in hysterics. He was so funny when he was younger – really quick-witted and funny. Very sharp. All that stopped.’
The scammers kept calling, telling Tim to pay the money to get his investment out. This time it was Gill who was taking the calls. Tim couldn’t face it.
‘At the end, when we said: “You obviously stole our money,” they would deny it, saying: “No, no, no, it’s your money. You just need to pay this commission.”
‘If you start accusing them of criminal behaviour, they really start getting nasty. Within a few days, the website had gone and you couldn’t get hold of them.’
Gill reported it to Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, which provides a central point of contact for victims to report scams.
Industry rules introduced in 2024 mean that victims scammed into sending money by bank transfer, known as authorised push payment fraud, should be refunded by their bank.
Tim was scammed in 2022 before these rules came in and was encouraged by the fraudsters to transfer money from his NatWest bank account to other accounts he held before sending it to them.
A NatWest spokesman said: ‘We were recently made aware of this customer’s investment scam experience in 2022.
After a thorough review of his transactions, we can see that he has made payments from his account with us to accounts which he held with other institutions/ payment providers.
‘Reviewing the history, this would not have been what we considered at the time to be unusual. We cannot comment on what happened when his money transferred to other providers.’
But the scammers weren’t finished. After the initial fraud, Tim continued to receive phone calls from criminals claiming they could help recover his money – for a fee.
These ‘recovery room’ scams target people who have already fallen victim, offering false hope in exchange for additional payments. The contact can either come from the original fraudsters or others to whom they have passed on details of victims.
‘For probably two years people would be phoning him saying they could get his money back,’ says Gill. ‘Action Fraud had warned us this would happen, so we weren’t taken in again.’
Eighteen months after the scam, Tim developed back pain that led to a devastating diagnosis: pancreatic cancer that had already spread throughout his body.
Gill says: ‘They said he had three or four months, and they couldn’t do anything because it had already spread to the stomach lining and possibly to the liver.
‘When he was diagnosed as being terminal, he was so philosophical about it all,’ says Gill. ‘I think he was just saying to himself: “I’ve had enough of this.” He almost willed himself to die.’
Tim opted against having chemotherapy and came home for his final week. He died just before Christmas.
‘At least he was at home, and it was calm and peaceful,’ says Gill. ‘But it was just so sad. I thought it was unnecessary. Nobody’s going to live for ever, but I think he could have had a few more years.’
Today, she lives alone in their Launceston home on a modest income. She has had to sell her car. Her daily life has contracted. ‘I don’t eat very much; the dog eats more than I do. It will impact the whole of the rest of my life. I have to be very, very careful with every pound.’
Gill rarely entertains now, partly because of the cost but also because the inclination simply isn’t there without Tim. Despite her devastation, she has chosen to speak publicly. She says: ‘I certainly don’t want his name blackened in any way.
I want him to have due respect because he was just trying to do his best. He thought he was doing the right thing. He was a good man.
‘I think nearly everybody thinks it’s not going to happen to them. But I want people to know that if someone like Tim –someone careful, intelligent, with a military background – can fall for this, it really can happen to anyone. It makes no difference what your background is. It’s about how they manipulate human nature. They almost hypnotise you.’
Gill’s experience reflects a growing crisis, that she believes the Government is failing to address adequately, from a staggering amount of cryptocurrency fraud by international criminal networks in the UK.
‘When you think of how many billions must be leaving the British economy to these scams, the Government needs to do more about this,’ she says.
Her advice is uncompromising: ‘Any advert you see on social media with famous faces on it, don’t touch it. If it looks too good to be true, it is.
‘Tim was just trying to do his best for us,’ Gill says, her voice breaking slightly. ‘He wanted to make sure I would be financially secure. Instead, these people took everything – our money, his dignity and, ultimately, I believe, his life.’
If you believe you have been the victim of a cryptocurrency investment scam, contact Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040. You can also contact Victim Support on 0808 16 89 111.
