In the winter of 2017, a well-dressed stranger walked into a quiet cocktail bar on the Isle of Wight and changed the life of the young woman behind the counter. He was tall, polished, and articulate, the kind of person rarely seen in the small seaside town of Shanklin. He introduced himself as Bertie Underwood, a horologist who had just moved to the island from the mainland and bought a house with a sea view. Within weeks, everyone knew who he was.
Megan was twenty years old, running the bar she had helped turn into a trendy local success, and enjoying the dating scene after two years of being single. Bertie stood out immediately, and when a massive bunch of flowers arrived at the bar with a note demanding she be ready for a seven o’clock date that evening, it felt like something out of a film. Her friends, especially her mother and her close-knit circle of girlfriends, were swept up in the excitement. The first date was at the Royal in Ventnor, the finest restaurant on the island.
After dinner, he invited her back to his place for tea. His home was a beautiful three-story house filled with artwork and antiques, each piece accompanied by a story about how he had acquired it. He told her he was a lord, a title passed down from his grandfather, and that his great-great-grandfather had invented the Underwood typewriter, which explained both his name and his fortune. They shared a kiss in the car on the way home.
Megan was giddy. Her mother remembers her being ecstatic, describing him as well-spoken and kind, someone she wanted to bring home to her family. The relationship moved at a breathless pace. There were trips to London, expensive gifts, perfume, clothes, shoes, and Harrods bags.
He bought her a car. Her family loved him. Within months, she moved into his house, and over dinner one day, he told her he loved her. It felt like a dream come true.
But there was another side to Bertie Underwood. On the mainland, a man named Mike had met him in 2016 while working at a supermarket in Hastings. Bertie, then calling himself Robert, approached him, claiming they had chatted on Grindr. They became friends.
Bertie dressed well, spoke with a posh accent, and carried himself with an air of eccentric nobility. He told Mike he was a lord, and Mike had no reason to doubt it. They went to pubs, visited art galleries in Brighton, and once, Bertie offered to take Mike to Venice because a friend had dropped out and the tickets were already paid for. All he needed was a copy of Mike’s passport to change the documentation.
Mike provided it without thinking much of it. On another visit, Bertie said his eBay account had been frozen and asked if Mike would sell a Rolex watch on his behalf. Mike agreed. About a month later, his messages exploded with strangers accusing him of taking their money, thousands of pounds, all of them sending pictures of the same Rolex.
Bertie had used Mike’s passport screenshot to convince buyers they were dealing with a genuine person. When Mike confronted him, Bertie promised to sort it out. That was the last time Mike ever saw him. Back on the Isle of Wight, Megan and Bertie celebrated their first Christmas together.
Sitting on the sofa, he produced a red Cartier bag, dropped to one knee, and asked her to marry him. The ring was stunning, and she was blown away. Her mother was shocked at how soon it had happened and asked if she was sure. Megan was in the moment, happy and excited, convinced this was the life she wanted.
Wedding planning began immediately, a no-expense-spared affair. Bertie hinted that she would gain a title by marrying him. Yet there were warning signs. Bertie refused to let Megan post any photos of him on social media, and when she questioned it, he lost his temper completely.
Her friendships began to fray, especially with her closest friends, who noticed she was drifting away and becoming more isolated. He pressured her to abandon the bar she had worked so hard to build, and she eventually sold it and went to work for him, handling his watch business from a workshop in the house. That made her entirely dependent on him financially. She sat and watched him work by headlamp every evening, thinking he was brilliant.
Bertie had also cultivated a long-distance friendship with an artist named Alex, who lived abroad. They spoke regularly, and Bertie eventually introduced Megan to Alex over the phone. Alex believed Bertie was an earl. Alex had met him through a personal ad on Craigslist in 2016, when Alex was living in Korea and wanted to return to the UK to make art about British culture.
Bertie answered the ad with elaborate, endearing stories, including one about having his face surgically reconstructed after his ex-boyfriend tried to kill him. The stories were entertaining but dark, and Bertie was clearly skilled at drawing people in. He drove a Bentley, spoke of his bodyguard and driver, and hinted that he wanted to commission a major artwork from Alex for a mansion he was buying on the Isle of Wight for the woman he was seeing. He never told Alex he was engaged.
Alex’s friendship with Bertie eventually turned sinister when Bertie asked him to doctor bank statements and passports. Alex refused, and Bertie vanished. But Alex, still curious about who Bertie really was, decided to test one of his claims by contacting a person Bertie said he knew. That person turned out to be a police officer, who told Alex plainly that Bertie was dangerous and that Alex needed to get as far away from him as possible.
Megan’s own suspicions had begun to stir. The house received a steady stream of mail addressed to someone who did not live there. When she asked Bertie about it, she got no answers. She searched his office and found a wallet containing numerous bank cards in multiple different names, none of them Bertie Underwood.
When she confronted him, his attitude changed instantly. He became defensive and furious. Her heart raced. She began questioning everything.
She and her mother did what anyone would do: they googled the names. His mug shot appeared everywhere. Bertie Underwood was a convicted con man, featured in news articles and on wanted pages aimed at warning jewelers. He had conned Bentley dealers.
He had defrauded Harrods for half a million pounds. And he was not a lord at all. He was a man from a council estate in Hastings who had been pretending to be nobility by putting on an accent and wearing expensive clothes. Megan’s stomach dropped.
This was the man her daughter was going to marry. He had duped them all. They had been groomed as a family. Then the letters started arriving in Megan’s name: credit cards, loans, a car, phone bills, business accounts, all taken out without her knowledge, totaling around thirty thousand pounds.
The police and Action Fraud could do little. Because they had been in a relationship, many of the debts were treated as domestic issues rather than fraud. Megan had to bite the bullet and start paying them off. Bertie came to see her one last time, insisting he loved her and that he hadn’t meant to take things this far.
It was the last time she saw him in person. Her mother told her not to worry: they had the engagement ring. They would sell it and clear the debts. But when they took the ring to a jeweler in Ryde, it tested as fake.
So was everything else. Megan was left with nothing but debt. She and her mother decided to fight back. They wrote a post detailing what Bertie had done and shared it as widely as possible.
It spread rapidly, reaching hundreds, then thousands of shares. Messages poured in from other victims. A colleague of Mike’s showed him the post, and Mike recognized the pattern immediately. People described how Bertie had stolen from them, ruined their lives, and in some cases used dating sites to dupe men into sharing their financial details.
Megan also learned that multiple men had contacted her on Facebook to say they had been sleeping with Bertie, sometimes in her own bed. The man who had been her entire world had never been real. Mike reached out to the victims and became determined to see Bertie brought to justice. Together with others who came forward, they built a case with enough evidence for a jury.
Bertie was found guilty in his absence, and the judge sentenced him to five years in prison. It also emerged that he had done this before, been convicted, served time, and simply resumed his schemes upon release. About a year and a half later, Megan received a message that Bertie had been arrested again. Even then, she discovered he had been using her career and her website to corroborate his lies with new victims, a clever technique that let other people tell his story for him.
Megan had to cancel the wedding and contact all the suppliers. She was angry about the wasted years and the debts she was left to repay. She worked relentlessly to clear them and rebuilt her life from scratch. A hobby in photography, born near the end of the relationship, unexpectedly became a successful business.
She found a new partner, bought a home, and got her mortgage. Her life became exactly what she had wanted when she was with him. But Bertie had not finished running. He walked out of an open prison while serving his sentence, and at the time her story was told, he remained wanted by the police.
He had not even completed the short time he owed. Megan’s mother summed it up: you could not write it.