Jail for the lonely hearts fraudster

A serial romance fraudster who stole from ‘naive’ women in a £440,000 scam by wooing them on a series of Bumble dates has been jailed for more than four years. Vimal Popat, 41, persuaded his smitten victims to invest in a bogus business venture by posing as a successful Forex trader and gaining their trust, between 2013 and 2019. He transferred cash totalling £440,824.50 to his own bank account before gambling it away at casinos and inventing excuses for being…