Raymond McDonald: The downfall of a dating fraudster

As with many elaborate con tricks, not everything Raymond McDonald said was a lie.

He had indeed been in the army. Dishonourably discharged in 2000, McDonald worked briefly in a supermarket and at a factory packing chickens but soon began committing fraud.

He received his first prison term in 2003. A suspended sentence was handed to him four years later, followed by four more stints in jail.

Released during the term he was given in 2019, he immediately began scamming another woman and was recalled to prison.

Within two weeks of his release last December he was back on dating sites picking targets.

When the women learned the truth, they were devastated.

“My whole world fell apart,” says one. “I was just a wreck.”

Another told us that, after detectives turned up at her house and told her what had been happening, she “couldn’t get out of bed”.

And the woman who thought she had married him added: “He said his love was real yet everything he told me about himself was a lie.”