An innocuous newspaper advert extolling the benefits of oriental medicine led a gullible young woman to a con man who preyed on her vulnerability and allegedly swindled her of more than €23,000.

The promise of looking young and beautiful in The Sunday Times classified advert on October 15, 2006 caught the eye of Charlene* and changed her life forever.

“This man wrecked my life. I was so naive, but it never crossed my mind a person could go to such lengths to invent such outrageous lies,” the 30-year-old from Żurrieq says, constantly admonishing herself for being such an ingénue.

For the next five years she embarked on a journey with the man who kept her in his grip by spinning a web of lies that led her to believe she had a rare, highly contagious skin disease.

He isolated her from her loved ones by warning her that if she breathed a word about her condition to anyone she would lose her job at the pharmaceutical factory and if she sought medical help from doctors they would lock her up in Boffa Hospital.

It finally dawned on her she was being taken on a ride at the beginning of this year and when she started digging deeper into this man’s history everything started unravelling.

She eventually plucked up the courage to report him to the police, even though she was so indoctrinated by this man that to this day she still finds it hard to believe her skin disease is another lie.

When contacted, the police confirmed they have just started investigating her allegations of fraud.

Looking back on how it all started, Charlene recalls how she found the advert all the more appealing as she hinged her hopes on this medicine to cure her scaly skin and itching, especially since the advert assured potential clients “oriental doctors and trained Maltese staff” were at hand.

Coming from a broken home, Charlene initially lived with her aunt who hounded her with disparaging remarks about her skin, making her more self-conscious of the problem.

She made an appointment and met a charming man who ran his business from an outlet in a hotel.

Her objective was to lose weight and treat the itching and the man had just the products for her – natural remedies, which he claimed were imported from China by a Mongolian scientist he worked with and which were so perishable they had to be kept in the fridge.

Rummaging through the kitchen cupboard, Charlene proffers two clear plastic pump bottles with a gooey white liquid inside.

There is no brand name and the makeshift labelling, stuck on with adhesive tape, just says what the product is. It includes application instructions riddled with mistakes, but there is no list of ingredients or active substances, nor is there an expiry date.

When she tried one of the first products the man prescribed, she had a severe allergic reaction and her eczema flared up. She immediately stopped using them and called back him back to inform him of the consequences.

The man felt responsible and insisted she undergo urine and blood tests at his ‘clinic’, which according to him established that Charlene had a rare skin disease.

“He told me he was a lawyer who had studied oriental medicine in China, but I never saw any certificates and to date I don’t know if this is true or not,” she says.

As time passed the two struck up an unlikely friendship. One day he turned up in tears to her workplace claiming he had contracted her highly contagious skin disease.

He even told her he had infected his two young boys with this disease, and when she tried to point out that none of her family had succumbed to this malady, he shrugged it off and said they must be immune.

This was a huge blow that wracked her with guilt, forcing her deeper into his tight psychological grip.

“I felt I was to blame. He would call me crying everyday and warn me I could end up in prison for making him sick. Believing he was a lawyer I never doubted him,” she says.

So when he told her he needed Lm14,000 (€32,600) to repay the money he had borrowed to cover his trip, treatment and blood transfusion in Mongolia she felt she owed him all she had.

There was no way her salary from the factory would be enough, but he had the perfect plan laid out. He told her his brother ran a cleaning company and he could employ her to clean hotels and businesses part-time.

There was a time when she was working 100 hours a week and her performance at both workplaces started to suffer, something she regrets and apologises for. Since he was her ‘boss’, she never saw a penny from her part-time work as her salary went directly to him, plus she was giving him more than €200 a month from her full-time paycheque.

“I barely slept. My dad thought I was doing drugs because of the bags under my eyes and my change in character. I was a happy-go-lucky girl, but all that changed,” she says.

“I couldn’t speak to anybody about what I was going through. He told me not to befriend anyone because they would turn against me if they learnt about my illness. I was all alone and the only person I could share my worries with was him.”

Between 2007 and 2010 she handed him over €23,000 and all her trust. The psychological persecution persisted throughout these years, constantly preying on her conscience.

“He told me the hospital in Mongolia had kept his bad blood and when they tested it out on rats they were falling down dead. He said I probably needed pills to treat my plague and I’ll have to shave all my hair off,” she says, unconsciously running her fingers through her waist-length mane.

His tales started to unravel when Charlene’s friend turned up begging her to help her find a job. She gave her the name of the cleaning company the man’s brother ran, but it turned out it did not exist and was never registered.

That was when a light seemed to switch on in her head and she ventured to call this man’s father, only to discover that he knew nothing about his son’s supposed contagious disease or blood transfusion.

“I was incredulous. I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I realised I had been living a lie for so long. All I want now is to be compensated for all the money I gave him. Maybe I can start my life from scratch.”

* Names have been changed to protect the victim’s identity.