Married At First Sight bride Anita Barker was duped by a Tinder Swindler-style fraudster who conned his victims out of £1.24 million.
The 54-year-old operations manager dated the crook for three months before discovering his crimes, and said: “It was horrific. It shattered my trust.
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“That’s why I went on Married at First Sight – people were going to be checked and vetted.”
She is paired with groom Paul Richardson, 60, on the series – but viewers have seen her admit to feeling “drained” in their marriage, and refuse to move into their shared apartment.
Her last relationship was with the now-convicted Walter Mitty-type, who first aroused Anita’s suspicions when he suggested he was a longstanding family friend of Princess Anne, claiming they often went clay pigeon shooting together.
But as Anita’s son had been a Scots Guard who looked after the Queen, the family saw straight through his pack of lies.
They started their own investigations and contacted police – fortunately after Anita had declined his request for her to lend him £500.
She said: “It was like something off Netflix – the reason he was with me wasn’t because he liked me or he wanted to build something with me. He was with me because he had a plan to rob me.”
He once invited Anita to attend a clay pigeon-shooting event with his family and teased: “Don’t be surprised if Princess Anne shows up.”
Anita’s son worked at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and Windsor Castle, and regularly guarded Queen Elizabeth II, so she remembers thinking: “This is getting strange. Alarm bells were ringing.”
Anita continues: “I’d been seeing him for about two / three months and introduced him to the family.
“It was Boxing Day, actually, and I just thought: ‘Right, it’s time to introduce him to the family before all of the serious and intimate stuff starts.’”
However, her daughter and daughter-in-law started to search for Anita’s new man online, but were struggling to find any results.
They flagged their concerns, which prompted Anita to contact police before letting her new potential partner near her grandchildren.
“It was a bit of a scare,” continues Anita. “The gut was saying something was wrong.
“I went to the police and said: ‘Look, I’m seeing this guy, and we can’t find anything about him on the internet and I’m starting to worry that something’s not quite right – I need to be sure before I have them around my grandchildren.”
Police confirmed via the Clare and Sarah laws that the man was not a perpetrator of domestic violence or listed on the child sex offenders’ register.
However, after 15 minutes of searching, they noticed the numerous addresses listed and warned that he seemed “a bit of a Walter Mitty”.
Due to his own rights, police could not comment further.
Anita said: “I just ended it anyway.”
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But four months later, she received a letter to her home address, written in pencil – and the first line left her in tears.
She recalls: “I opened the letter, read the first line, and I was gobsmacked – I just cried. I couldn’t read any more of the letter.
“I took the letter down to my daughters.
“It was a confessional letter. His name wasn’t the name he told me.
“He told me his real name – so that’s why we couldn’t find anything about him, it wasn’t his name.
“He was incarcerated in Durham prison – he was in there for fraud.
“And the story that came out over his previous 15 years was quite horrendous, to be honest.
“He’d stolen £1.24million off his friends. His marriage broke down.
“Then he went on to a sugar daddy website and stole £66,000 off two women.”
Anita had refused his request to borrow £500 from her, but police warn that he would have likely returned the money to build her trust and then requested more and more.
She has also since been warned that the confessional letter was not to ease his conscience. In fact he had contacted ANOTHER of his former victims in the same way, in a bid to convince one of them to use their addresses for an early release.
Anita has been in touch with the woman, who was taken to the same date spots by the conman including the same cinema, the same hotel in Edinburgh and the same adventure treehouse by the crook.
It had only been seven months after Anita endured a harrowing end to 2022. Her partner of 17 years left her at Christmas-time, a few days after she was made redundant from her job. Her mother had only just died on Bonfire Night – Anita believes the fraudster wanted a share of her home the family were selling.
Finding herself in a “sad bubble”, she learnt a new skill, fire eating, inked her left thigh with a huge tattoo and partied in a super club in Ibiza.
When her daughter joked she was having a breakdown, Geordie Anita dubbed it a “canny cool breakdown” and added a list of ambitions, including meeting someone genuine.
She chose to apply for Married At First Sight to ensure she did not meet another crook.
“I’d had someone in my house who I didn’t even know. So now I wanted them checked and vetted.”
However, viewers have seen Anita grow increasingly frustrated with her husband, who could not remember her children’s names, and implied he could take up to six years to develop a romantic connection with her.
She continued: “I’d spent 18 months finding myself – I’d been in a sad bubble, so I got used to being by myself, and now I’m here for the real deal. I haven’t got time to wait six years.”
In Thursday’s episode of MAFS, viewers saw Anita admit she has taken a “step back”, and tell Paul: “I’m at a point in my life where I need to know where I stand, I need to know you want the same thing
“I haven’t got time to waste.”
Married at First Sight continues on Sunday at 9pm on E4. Stream the series so far on Channel 4.
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