Some time ago I received a series of friend requests on Facebook, apparently from men in the USA armed forces. As I have a friend whose husband used to be a soldier, I looked at the first home page to see if either of them were there as mutual friends. But no, very few friends on the page and not much content, so I deleted that request and immediately deleted all the ones that followed. Last night on the BBC TV news, I saw similar faces of men in uniform and that heard one woman had been conned out of 1.5 million pounds.

The news report was excellent. After announcing the core of the story, it showed a man who looked nothing like those pictures that are posted on social media sites He was young, black, and pretty fleet footed as the camera followed him running away from the court building with the reporter yelling his name and asking what he had to say to his victims.

Then there was an interview with a woman, filmed so viewers only saw the back of her as she sat on a bench chatting to the reporter. She said she felt she had been turned into a puppet that had its strings pulled by someone else and although she would recover, the harm to her self-image worse than the money she had lost.

Next a sympathetic policeman explained the faudsters are professionals – they make a living from what they do and they are very good at it.

Then an actress posed as a potential victim. She responded to one of those friend requests and asked for a phone number to contact this “new friend”. Fortunately for the BBC reporter, she got a response from a clumsy conman because as soon as she phoned him, he told her what a lovely voice she had (“Wow!”) then immediately said he had a problem and asked her to send him 50 pounds. Ka-ching! As soon as the reporter took over the call saying he was from the BBC and it was obvious this was a scam, the phone clicked off.

So there we are, single ladies, all though all the nice girls love a soldier or a sailor be on your guard.