A SANTA POLA woman has been swindled out of €253,000 by her ‘boyfriend’ who met her online two years ago after targeting her for a big con.

His catalogue of lies included asking for a loan of €170,000 to send his ‘dying’ mother to a private clinic.

She also paid for shares worth €18,000 in an English Premier League football club that the fraudster claimed he was going to be working for.

Guardia Civil agents from Santa Pola arrested the 42-year-old Uruguayan man in Elche as he was making preparations to flee Spain.

The Guardia said that the detained man, who now faces fraud charges, used a dating app to find somebody that he could exploit for his own financial gain.

After sifting through details of potential victims, he chose the Santa Pola woman and made contact with her after creating a bogus profile.

As the relationship developed, the loan demands started with the girlfriend choosing to help him out, totally oblivious to the fact that she was being conned.

In addition to helping the ill mother, the woman shelled out €5,000 to pay for her ‘burial’, and she was on hand again to supply a €50,000 loan to help the man’s sister avoid a home repossession.

She also paid for a dream holiday to Thailand which they never went on.

The penny eventually dropped at the end of September that her boyfriend was not what he made out to be, after she started to asked for the return of her money.

She filed a complaint with the Guardia Civil in Santa Pola, who tracked him down within a week.