A British woman who had been defrauded of up to £1m in a series of romance scams died in a road collision after travelling to West Africa in an effort to recover some of the money, an inquest in Devon was told.
Janet Fordham, a 69-year-old retired housekeeper, was allegedly targeted over five years by fraudsters operating from the UK, Germany, the US and Ghana. The inquest in Exeter heard she lost her life savings and her home during the campaigns.
Fordham went to Ghana after a man there told her he could help retrieve some of the funds. She was killed when the car he was driving left the road and overturned, the court was told.
Family members and officers from Devon and Cornwall police had tried to persuade Fordham to stop sending money to the criminals, but she was assessed as having capacity and could not be prevented from continuing contact.
Her daughter-in-law, Melanie Fordham, said Janet began using online dating sites in 2017 and met a man who claimed to be a British army sergeant major serving in Syria. He told her he needed help bringing gold bars to the UK, and Janet spoke of plans to marry and buy a house with him. Melanie warned her not to send money, but Janet is believed to have paid around £150,000 to that scam.
She was later conned by someone posing as a diplomat. Melanie said Janet appeared to recognise she had been scammed but struggled to accept it, and it was unclear how she moved from one fraud to another. Payments were made by various methods, including bank transfers, postal wire services and possibly through a travel agent.
At some point Fordham was contacted by a man in Ghana known as Kofi, who claimed to be a doctor and said he discovered she was being scammed while working part-time in a phone shop. He told her he could help recover her money and she flew to Accra in October 2022.
Melanie said she consulted Janet’s doctor and sought legal advice, but because Janet was judged to be of sound mind, there was no power to stop her travelling. The inquest heard the relationship with the man in Ghana developed into a romance and Janet agreed to marry him.
On 14 February 2023, while he was driving her to meet a family member to discuss the marriage, the car swerved and flipped onto its roof. Fordham was not wearing a seatbelt and sustained fatal head injuries. Devon and Cornwall police found no evidence of third-party involvement; the driver admitted a driving offence.
Detective Sergeant Ben Smith described Fordham as the victim of a “sustained fraud” between 2017 and 2022, estimating she had sent between £800,000 and £1m to scammers. He said she had sold her home and land and had been living in a caravan in Devon. Police made repeated efforts to dissuade her from contacting the criminals or handing over money.
Senior coroner Philip Spinney noted there were “some inconsistencies and gaps in the evidence” about the crash and that it had not been thoroughly examined. He concluded that Janet Fordham died from a head injury probably sustained in a road traffic collision.
