‘I Was Conned By A Fireman Who Was Living A Double Life’ | This Morning

It is one of the most elaborate scams we have seen in more than two years. Colleen Greenwood thought she was going to marry her firefighter boyfriend, James, but even though he came home in uniform and smelled smoke, it turned out that James was actually called Greg and he had a wife and three children just down the road. street. Well, now Colleen joins us to tell us her story. Good

morning

, welcome and I'm sorry you had to go through something like

this

in your

life

. um, it's an elaborate story and we'll talk about it now. You were, you were divorced and you're thinking I'm going to dive back into the dating world.

It was in 2014 when she met James, as they called him then. online, what he was like, what attracted you to him in the first place he just seemed like a really nice good guy said he was divorced with two daughters had a bit of a sour relationship with his ex like a lot of people do but no red flags not at all nice Just a normal guy and we'll exchange messages, well you started, I mean doing the messaging, it was a dating app, so you said everyone is looking for everyone, uh, so you're exchanging messages, then you meet up for a coffee and face to face. he liked him in person what made you click he was quite an outgoing character, much more talkative than i would say he was more shy just funny just a good guy and didn't look like brad pitt or just average , but he was affectionate, he bought you flowers, sometimes he bought you flowers twice a day, I mean, even in the office he brought them and your colleagues would laugh, probably a little jealous of what was going on, so, there is no red flags like you said. and I say

this

even to the point where you realize it's a hoax, but the moment you walk through your door dressed in full uniform like a firefighter smelling like smoke, knowing now what you know, but it's all part of this great Rusev police, the lemons who went to manipulate everyone.

I mean, he was very knowledgeable about the fire service, his father was in the fire service, so he was in the stations growing up, he knew the lingo, but then I would listen to him on the phone with the station manager and when I received a text message. Darlington government fire service emails he went to with such elaborate details and how carefully he was able to drag everyone into his lies. Wow, well, six months into the relationship, you were feeling pregnant and you had had complications in the past, so you decided not to continue yes it was that pregnancy because he had two girls and I supposedly had had two girls and I had two girls and no. he wanted to have more children because he had had complications we came to the difficult decision that he was probably better than us, yeah, it wasn't easy and um and uh, so he went and got a vasectomy, yeah, he showed you the scar he had, Yes, it's like gauze and it moved because it was very painful, right?

I ever saw a scar or something, no, I saw something that looked like Brews and I didn't get up to look closely, but there's a little bit of gauze inside, but I was uncomfortable, yeah, so, yeah, well, we should They say that, according to The NHS, one in 2,000 men can become fertile after a vasectomy, but then say they have a sperm count of zero. He underwent a vasectomy 15 months into the relationship. Are you pregnant again? He showed me the medical report. showing that he had a zero sperm count because before that she was very scared. I mean, we had been careful.

I had gotten pregnant, it could happen again, so I was off the table and he did what I thought was such a selfless thing. Today I was 34 he showed me the results and then two months later I felt pregnant again and you're thinking at that moment oh my god he's going to think I'm having enough that he's horrified by his family his friends are going to think I've cheated on him because Well, you wouldn't, you'd have questions, you'd certainly have questions, no, we wish, and I thought, what a loving man, he never doubted, he's saying, he's saying, it's a miracle, it was thought. be, he told my mom that it was the original baby, we made a mistake and this was the original baby coming back, he actually said it was my mother, but he is against June God, it was his words during the pregnancy and then it comes out with the marriage planner.

I mean, he's got everything, yeah, yeah, just December, about a week before Christmas, he walked into the

living

room, my daughters are there, you know, when something's different and there's a little spark of excitement and then he said, take a look at the Christmas tree. so I got up very pregnant, I went up to the tree and there was a little black book that said: Colleen Scott's Wedding Diary. I need to plan. Church invested the entire wedding cake. Tasting of the wedding dress that he adapted to the place. The honeymoon. So he had it all planned and still.

He has an excuse for it not to happen because he says he is not feeling well. He discovers a lump in his testicles so the wedding cannot go ahead. In fact, that is not the first wedding, but there is a second wedding that is later planned and backed out. Your sister is starting to get a little suspicious at this point and they had been working together, she owned some boiler properties and he had gone in and replaced the boilers with new ones when she came back and looked at them and did it. Some investigations were old boilers, so the red flags for her were starting to show.

She came to you with this. At that time there were some other things that she just discovered. She came with this concern but again James became enraged because he was so manipulative he said he had been let down he believed the boilers had been changed she has these documents to support that there had been and she was alarmed because there were rental properties and she wanted them gone sure so she started looking for other jobs he said it had come about because they had helped him because she had her own real estate business and the jobs had not been done and she had invested some money in a business that he was setting up and she started to feel a little bit You know, it was suspicious here, so I started to dig a little deeper and I couldn't get any results from the phone calls from the people who were dealing with it, so I decided that this was actually what would have been the day of my second wedding which he postponed because his girls couldn't come to the wedding um and uh and you I think you were going to come see you this is where they were all going to chat together she actually called me while we were out and said coming back to the house I'm so sorry, Colleen, I found out I was at Winnie's, they told me he never bought the wedding, at which point he says, I'm just going out for a minute, I mean, he, uh, he. he at that point was still trying to talk to everyone around him, it was his mother who didn't want him to get married, it wasn't his fault and at this point he disappears, well we actually drove back home, yeah my sister called.

She stood up and said: I am not happy. I want to confront him. I want the treasure to arrive at this point. He stopped in my path. He threw the groceries on the road. He passed our baby to my youngest daughter through an open window. She got into the car. She said. I'll be back in a minute and you never saw him again, you contacted the police with his registration number and found out that his name was actually Greg Wilson. Well, one of your daughters found him on Facebook and discovered that he was married. Another woman had three children, so he was

living

a completely

double

life

, he was not a firefighter at all, that was also a complete lie, because it is not a fraud to lie to someone about your life, there is nothing you can do about it. regard. but because he was with his sister and there was this connection to work, he was sentenced to six years in prison in 2020.

That was partly for putting a false name on our children's birth certificates, that was partly the reason why which is true, pleaded guilty to forgery fraud. convert criminal property and make a full declaration the birth certificate of a child um six years old you have why did he do it because the police have said that this was not actually motivated by finances no, I never gave him a cent I don't know what the only person who can answer that and to this day he is not answering it to anyone. I can speculate, I think maybe he just decided, maybe you initially decided that he wanted to have an affair and that's why he started and then he got so into the role that he was acting that he almost became maybe he partly believed himself to be. no no you're not the only one because there was also someone else he was involved with he has his family he has his wife um there's a thought that maybe his my wife assumed she suspected he was having an affair but she had no idea about all this other No life um I think she knew he was having an affair, he had had one before, but no, I mean, he manipulated everyone around him um, how do you do what?

You know, normally we would say that when someone comes in and sits here, well, there's a caveat, you know, he was so good, how do you get around that? I mean so many companies and people that are so much smarter than me, and so on and so on. With this guy for two and a half years, he wasn't part of our family, he was a big part of our family, we all loved him, so why wouldn't you question someone we were marrying and there was never any red flag until that dusty cauldron that Karen suspected well that's an incredible story you've written in your book here playing with fire that's your story it's also on Love on the BBC Sounds podcast with Vicki Patterson your story is there right now, um, and if you feel it, you feel like you can trust again, like, where are you now?

I'm happy now that I'm remarried to the nicest guy I could have ever wanted. I mean, I won't lie. It has changed me as a person that you couldn't do, yes, and when I met my husband I had to see his birth certificate, he passed away, all his family and friends, but I am happy and now I want to help other people, that's why. I've written the book and that's why I did the podcast with Vicky because I couldn't stop this from happening to me, but you're ashamed of being the victim, there's no two ways about it and it's not right, and I want other people to know that this It happened to me but I wouldn't like to do it right you know exactly thank you thank you very much