‘My husband messaged a woman called Jenny on TikTok – then she stole our life savings’
Dear Katie,
I discovered that my husband has been working as a third-party seller on the app TikTok. He started selling items such as stationery and handbags in the summer of last year and apparently made quite a lot of money.
However, things started to go wrong pretty quickly. He confessed to me that TikTok was withholding £18,000 in payments and was refusing to release profits to him. I was absolutely shocked to my core.
On top of this, I lost my job four months ago. I am the main breadwinner for our family and have taken a part-time job instead, as my child has problems at school and needs me.
Meanwhile, my husband has become a turtle. He is depressed and has gone into his shell and buried his head in the sand. He says he is dealing with it but he is not. He has not been trading on TikTok for months now.
Today, I checked his bank statements and discovered that he has sent our life savings of £40,000 from his NatWest bank account to various foreign accounts. I simply do not know what to do.
This is affecting our marriage and he is drinking and having problems at work. Please help.
– Anon
Dear reader,
Concerned about what might be going on here, I asked to speak to your husband on the phone.
He explained that he had been selling items through the social media app TikTok’s shop function, after seeing videos on the platform by women saying they were making “easy money” there.
He said he had considered it for some time before deciding to message a lady he now cannot remember the name of, who kept popping up on his feed. He said the woman had quickly set him up with a TikTok shop through the official app, and then he chose up to 30 items from suppliers on the platform to put in his shop.
So did he actually ever see any of this stock, I asked him? No, he said, it was apparently held in a remote warehouse. And was he making social media videos or live streams to sell the products, I asked? No, he said, they were simply listed on the platform.
Your husband had zero experience in social media or retail, but it was all incredibly easy, he told me.
Despite your husband having next to no followers on the TikTok app, the orders started rolling in thick and fast, he said. So fast, in fact, that he could not keep up with them.
The shop worked by customers paying straight into the TikTok platform, he said. Then TikTok would (eventually) pay him a proportion of the sold items’ price as profit, after he had paid the suppliers for the goods separately.
However, there was no way to limit orders, so within a matter of weeks, your husband found himself in trouble after selling too many handbags. He was conversing with an account which he thought to be TikTok customer services, which threatened to suspend his account unless he paid in a sum of £10,000.
After this, he was told, the profits totalling nearly £20,000, could be released. At this point, he had transferred around £40,000 in chunks from his NatWest business bank account directly to several foreign bank accounts.
It was around this time that the woman, who had been helping and messaging him throughout the process, also stopped replying to his messages. It dawned on him that this exciting venture, which he had hoped might pay off your mortgage and change your lives for the better, might be a cruel scam.
He took screenshots of these conversations and told the account purporting to be TikTok customer services that he had done so.
I told your husband something I do not think he was surprised to hear: I was sure he had been scammed. This was confirmed by the real TikTok, which analysed multiple screenshots he had taken of the “shop” and established he was on a rogue version of the app or another app entirely.
Your husband was initially resistant to this idea, insisting he had definitely been using the real TikTok. But then, after our conversation went around in circles several times, he remembered that the woman he’d been chatting to had sent him a link in which he was instructed to open a “new” version of TikTok, before deleting the old one.
He described this as a “penny drop moment” in realising how the scam had been perpetrated.
I also wanted to help your husband find out who had scammed him, so I asked him for the name and TikTok handle of the woman he had been messaging. I was stunned when your husband said he had no recollection of it. And when I asked to see the screenshots of the conversations with the woman he had previously said he had, he said he had deleted them.
I asked why in the world he would delete crucial evidence of a suspected scam into which he had put his life savings – he told me he did it because he was angry. I made no effort to hide that I thought this was very strange indeed.
Again, I asked your husband to wrack his brain about the woman’s name and, eventually after a lot of pushing, it came to him: she was called Jenny.
He remembered he had taken a screenshot of an advert he had seen from Jenny, which he still had on his phone. He sent it to me, but it did not show her account handle. This meant neither myself nor TikTok were able to link it back to an account. A Google image search on the screenshot also yielded nothing.
Your husband told me that when he suspected it was all a scam, he decided to message other women making similar videos about how they were making money on TikTok shop, to which they apparently replied that they felt he was being scammed.
But when I asked him to screenshot and send me these conversations, he said he had deleted them as well. When I asked why, he said he liked having a “clean inbox” and it was just something he did.
Dear reader, I have no doubt in my mind that your husband was scammed. And I can see the devastation this has caused for your family. I’m truly sorry for what you have had to deal with these past few months and for the regret and shame your husband is probably experiencing.
If he’s struggling with his mental health, might I recommend that he consult his GP and could consider contacting charities such as the Mental Health and Money Advice service, Mind or the Samaritans.
I know you really wrote to me for help with getting this money back, and while I am more than happy to point your husband in the right direction, I am afraid I do not feel able to approach his bank, NatWest, about a refund.
I will cut to the chase about why – the holes in his evidence showing what happened make me feel uncomfortable.
As things stand, I cannot confidently make a case to the bank that he did all he could to protect himself from harm. I also have to consider the hundreds of equally deserving readers who are queuing up for help as I write this, and the fact that I do not have time to help them all.
I have sent your husband the information he needs to claim a refund under something called the Contingent Reimbursement Model with Natwest, and have given him some pointers on what to include. He also needs to report the scam to the police, although they are unlikely to take action.
I have not secured the £40,000 refund you both so desire here, but even so, I think you writing to me has been worthwhile. You both have a clearer idea of what has occurred and, crucially, you are in a far better position to help yourselves.
I have warned your husband to exercise extreme caution over all things online, as the scammers, who are still out there, are likely to strike again under a different guise. TikTok said it has removed content that violates its Community Guidelines around fraud and scams.
I am all too aware it is a cliché but, in future, your husband would do well to remember the phrase “if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is”.