George Vincent Henderson seemed like the perfect man.
When Lori Uhryn met Henderson on a dating site in 2016, he was everything she was looking for. Uhryn had recently lost her husband, and Henderson claimed he was himself a widower. He showered her with affection and told Uhryn he was grateful to have found love again.
Those early messages were the start of a twisted web of international fraud that landed Uhryn in an Edmonton courtroom, where she pleaded guilty last month to money laundering.
According to an agreed statement of facts filed in the case, George Vincent Henderson does not exist. He was the creation of an unidentified scammer or scammers who intercepted two international transactions worth nearly one million dollars and deposited them in the account belonging to Uhryn’s family business.
Henderson then asked Uhyrn to transfer the money to various other accounts, telling her the payments needed to go through before they could be together.
Uhryn tearfully apologized in Edmonton Court of King’s Bench at a sentencing hearing on Nov. 5. She was given a two-year conditional sentence, to be served in the community.
“I am very sorry for having involved myself in criminal wrongdoing and the pain and loss that this has caused the victims,” she said. “I just want them to know that I had no idea that they even existed.”
Shipping containers and a sailboat
Uhryn’s husband Jim died in 2014 after 30 years of marriage. They were also business partners in SubConsult Inc., an oilfield equipment supplier in Leduc. After grieving him for two years, at 53 years old, Uhryn joined a dating site, where she met the person pretending to be Henderson, who said he was living in the United Kingdom. They grew close enough that, by mid-2017, Uhryn was loaning him money.
Uhryn also spent thousands on failed attempts to meet Henderson, travelling to Scotland and Dubai in 2016 and 2017. Each time, he claimed to be unable to meet due to an emergency, including that he was in hospital or jail for his role in a workplace accident. She also booked flights for him to travel to Alberta, which went unused.
Then, beginning in May 2018, hundreds of thousands of dollars began to appear in SubConsult’s bank account. The money came from two transactions between businesses on different sides of the world intercepted by the Henderson scammer or someone connected to them.
The first involved the sale of a sailboat from a yachting brokerage company in Croatia to a similar company in Turkey.
Somehow, an unknown person or persons gained access to the buyer and sellers’ emails and created addresses closely resembling each account (in one case substituting an “l” for an “i”). The fraudster sent a contract that substituted the Croatian company’s actual banking information for the account belonging to SubConsult. The Turkish purchaser wired two transactions totalling 92,000 euros to the account in May 2018.
The two companies eventually realized they had been scammed and filed a fraud alert.
Uhyrn visited her bank in Leduc after the fraud alert was filed. She presented a forged invoice claiming to document a transaction between SubConsult and the Turkish yachting company. She also brought a photocopy of the Turkish buyer’s passport, which the person claiming to be Henderson sent her. The Canadian bank refunded 9,200 euros to the Turkish company, but 82,200 euros — which Uhryn claimed was a “brokerage fee” — remained with SubConsult.
The second fraud involved a Florida shipping company attempting to purchase transport racks from a company in South Korea, a transaction totalling more than US$683,000.
Between the two frauds, $915,246 was deposited into SubConsult’s bank account in the span of a week in May 2018. According to the agreed facts, police found no evidence either Uhryn or her son and business partner — whose charges were withdrawn after Uhryn’s guilty plea — were involved in intercepting the emails in either fraud.
Moving money
In the weeks after the money landed in SubConsult’s accounts, Uhryn made more than a dozen transactions at Henderson’s direction, wiring money to third parties and transferring it to her personal accounts (SubConsult’s account was frozen on June 15, 2018).
At first, Uhryn didn’t realize what she was doing was wrong. That changed around June 6, 2018, when her son told her she was being scammed as Henderson’s “customers” were demanding their money back.
From that point on, Uhryn admits she was “wilfully blind” to the likelihood the money was obtained by crime. Nevertheless, she continued to transfer money — totalling more than $413,000 — for Henderson. He claimed his accounts had been frozen and that he owed money for legal bills and fines related to the alleged workplace accident. When Uhryn’s son tried to set up a FaceTime call, Henderson claimed he didn’t know how to video conference.
Henderson later told Uhryn he had been detained at the Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre over an unpaid fine. She sent US$120,000 to an alleged associate in Hong Kong to cover his costs but was told it wasn’t enough.
A trip with a Mountie
A few weeks later, Uhryn and a former RCMP officer travelled to the U.K. to look for Henderson. The ex-Mountie was upfront with Uhryn — he believed she was being scammed by a romance fraudster. They checked the Heathrow jail and were told there was no record of a George Vincent Henderson at any correctional facility in the country. Uhryn realized she had been scammed and cried “almost the entire cab ride back to the hotel,” the former Mountie said.
In all, Uhryn admitted to laundering $677,590, the majority at the behest of Henderson, the remainder in transfers to her own accounts and travel costs paid out of the fraudulent funds.
Dino Bottos, Uhryn’s defence lawyer, told Court of King’s Bench Justice Eric Macklin his client thought she’d met “Mr. Wonderful” and ignored what should have been obvious “red flags” because she was lonely after the death of her husband.
Defence and Crown jointly proposed a two-year conditional sentence including house arrest and restitution. Uhryn previously paid back some of the money through private settlements.
Uhryn told court the years leading up to her arrest were “some of the most difficult of my life.” She had never heard of a “catfishing” scam until Bottos explained it to her.
Bottos said his client’s story is a “cautionary tale.”
“Ms. Uhryn wants other women to know about her story, so it doesn’t happen to them,” he said in an email.
Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add EdmontonJournal.comand EdmontonSun.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters.
You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. The Edmonton Journal | The Edmonton Sun