'It was total betrayal': Leduc woman finds herself in trouble with law after falling for romance scam

After losing her husband of 30 years to cancer, a man she'd been with since high school, a Leduc-area woman found herself lonely and vulnerable.

"It was extremely difficult losing my best friend, soulmate and love of my life," Lori Uhryn said in a statement to CTV News Edmonton.

"I was attending grief counselling after he passed away and after two years, decided possibly having a companion would be a good idea," she continued.

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In 2016, Uhryn joined an online dating site where she met a man named George Vincent Henderson.

"He told me he was a widow himself, that his wife died of breast cancer," she said.

Uhryn said Henderson told her he was originally from Montreal, living in Calgary and working overseas.

"Our conversations started out friendly and uplifting and started to create me in a positive outlook after so many dark days," said Uhryn.

The communication continued with texts, emails and calls between the two for about a year before Henderson asked her for money.

"Always promising to pay her back and these were small payments, $250 here by way of money order, $500 there, a visa payment here or there," said Dino Bottos, Uhryn's lawyer.

"Over the course of about 12 months or so, she ended up spending about $35,000 on this person," he said.

That included two unsuccessful trips to meet the new man in her life.

The first time Bottos said she went to Scotland to meet him. She said he told her he was an engineer, and that he'd been hurt in an industrial accident and was in the hospital.

She agreed to go see him in the hospital, but when she got there he wasn't.

"When she arrived back in Edmonton he emailed her saying he had been brought to another hospital, transferred, and while he was enroute he had no ability to communicate with her and was now in a hospital in London, England," said Bottos.

Six months later, he asked her to meet him in Dubai, where – again – Henderson was nowhere to be found, sending another email explanation to Uhryn when she got back to Edmonton.

"He had been whisked away by Scottish authorities, under arrest to face prosecution for that industrial accident that I mentioned," said Bottos.

"He was coming up with these excuses all the time," he added.

Still, Bottos said his client really believed her boyfriend was the "real deal" and would eventually come to live with her in Alberta.

In May 2018, about $915,000 appeared in Uhryn's business bank account.

"And he said basically, 'You see, I told you that I'm a businessman and my payday has finally come in,'" said Bottos.

In reality, the money was obtained fraudulently, Bottos said.

"Basically what happened was the monies came into her account because there was some fraudulent actor or actors out there that intercepted monies that were supposed to go from the purchaser of a yacht to the vendor of a yacht in two sets of purchases," Bottos said.

Another fraudulent purchase involved the sale of racks used to transport cargo.

Uhryn claimed Henderson told her to send the money to various contacts. Bottos said over the course of about a month, she sent $800,000 of it as asked – before her bank account was flagged for fraud.

"He told her to make up a false invoice showing that her company had earned that money," said Bottos.

She then took the false invoice to her bank.

"She did that under the instruction of this George Henderson," added Bottos.

Uhryn's son suspected she was being scammed and tried to warn her.

Hanging onto hope her relationship with Henderson was real, in July 2018 she hired a private investigator to fly to London with her in search of the truth.

"My reaction to finding out he did not exist was completely devastating; it was total betrayal," Uhryn said in her statement.

"This wasn't a real person but several people who were involved in this criminal activity," said Bottos.

"She just hoped against hope that this guy was real and was the new man in her life and was going to save her from years of loneliness, and so she ignored the warning signs," he added.

Bottos said she did contact the RCMP before going to London that July but never heard anything back.

Police eventually came knocking after being contacted by the people who were defrauded of the $915,000.

Uhryn pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering. She was sentenced last week to two years house arrest and ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution.

"She became, as we say in criminal law, criminally liable by way of willful blindness because she became aware of the probability that this was from a criminal fraud enterprise going on, but didn’t ask the sufficient questions to confirm what she likely knew to be true," Bottos said.

Uhryn is embarrassed about what happened but hopes her experience will help prevent other women from being victimized.

"If you feel like it's too good to be true, it probably is. Be very careful when lending a helping hand, especially to strangers," said Uhryn.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nav Sangha