Although meet a person online and starting a romantic relationship is becoming more and more common, sometimes scams can hide behind online contacts that go on for years without the victims ever discovering it. An example of this is the case that occurred in Australia, where a retiree spent more than a decade believing that he was married to a former model and left her his house as an inheritance, although the woman did not actually exist.
According to information published by Australian media such as Your Life Choice either The Courier-Mailthe man, who was already retired and divorced, met online in 2012 a supposed model named Stella, who said she was 36 years old and came from a wealthy family in New York. Since then, he had a romantic relationship with her for about twelve years, although they never met in person.
The retiree died in December 2025 and left a will in which he named the woman as the sole heir of his home. However, her daughter decided to go to court after trying to contact the alleged model and discovering that she could not prove her identity. Finally, Justice determined that the woman had never existed and allowed the daughter to keep her father’s inheritance.
He had been sending money to a woman he had never met for more than ten years
When he met the supposed model, the man was 71 years old. According to the details of the trial, he even believed that they had married in 2013; He had even told one of his friends by email, although he had never traveled to attend his own wedding, something that especially caught the judge’s attention.
During the following years, the alleged model began to ask him for money and the retiree sent different amounts to bank accounts that were in other people’s names.
He also sent bitcoins, iTunes and Steam gift cards, cash and mobile phones abroad. In addition, the woman had gotten him to provide her with the details of his credit cards, bank accounts and identity documents.
As it became known during the procedure, the man lived alone and barely had social relations. A bus driver who had befriended him described him as a loner, who did not seem to have a regular group of friends.
As the years went by, the money transfers practically wiped out his savings, to the point that the only asset he had left was his home.
His daughter discovered that the supposed model did not exist when she tried to locate her
In May 2024, the retiree decided to modify his will to leave the house to the woman with whom he believed he had a romantic relationship. However, when he died on Christmas Eve 2025, his daughter tried to contact the supposed heir to tell her that her father had left her the house.
From what he explained during the procedure, the woman refused to prove who she was and, instead of providing him with her information, she began to ask him for money. Shortly after, he deleted the conversation they had had.
Faced with this situation, the daughter went to the Supreme Court of Queensland to prevent the house from ending up in the hands of those who had deceived her father for so many years.
One of the issues that the judge took into account was that there was no evidence that the supposed model was a real person, despite the fact that the retiree had maintained that relationship for more than a decade.
“I am convinced that Stella is not a real person and that she never existed during the extraordinary period of more than a decade of the alleged relationship,” the magistrate said.
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Finally, the Court considered that the woman was an invented identity and recognized the daughter as the sole beneficiary of the inheritance, in addition to naming her in charge of managing her father’s assets.