Mate crime: how friendship is being used as a weapon to steal and control | Money

In the beginning, Mandy Davis* thought she was helping out a friend. Paying his rent in their flatshare was an obvious move after he told her he was about to lose his job.

But what started as a helping hand was quickly met with controlling behaviour when he started to criticise what she ate and her hygiene. Soon she felt confined to her room due to his belittling jibes, and was left on the brink of suicide.

After years of abuse, he eventually departed, leaving the vulnerable woman exploited and more than £30,000 out of pocket.

“I acted under duress – I was put under enormous pressure and my mental ill-health was exploited. I have lost enormous amounts of money,” she says.

“I feel as if he exploited my vulnerability due to my mental health, by making me believe he was going to rot away on the street, and decided to take my money, and call me abusive.”

Davis now realises, after help from friends and charities, that she was the victim of “mate crime” – loosely defined as exploitation, abuse or theft involving someone who claims to be a friend.

Often associated with the elderly, or those with learning difficulties, it can happen to anyone, say experts, and has become easier in recent years with the development of online friendships and relationships.

Davis says there was no sign of what would transpire when she first offered her friend – whom she had known for a few years – a home when he said he was at risk of homelessness. But it soon became clear that he was not going to lose his job – merely that he did not like it.

“He thought living in the flatshare on my money would be more convenient. I got annoyed that my offer to help was based on a misrepresentation of his situation,” she says.

“He told me I’d made a binding promise to support him, and started guilt-tripping me – since he would be homeless and could not return to his job – and also made clear he thought I didn’t give him enough money.”

His behaviour varied between friendly and “intense” fairly soon after he moved in. He became controlling, calling her unhygienic, blaming her if anything broke and criticising her political opinions. He regularly turned off the heating, leaving her in the cold.

Despite this, she tried to be engaging and friendly, believing that she was helping someone in need, but his behaviour worsened.

“At some point I avoided any conversations so as not to be put down,” she says.

Davis’s mental health before he moved in was poor, and she found confrontation difficult. She also suffers from a neurological condition and had a history of depression.

As his behaviour worsened, she became increasingly unwell. “Every time I tried to stop paying him, he would start getting intense. He would sometimes be ‘accepting’ of me, but then double down on the abuse.”

As well as paying his rent, she gave him money to live on. When she tried to stop, he said she would be making him homeless. “Whenever I tried to call him out on his behaviour, he would turn it around and call me abusive, mean and a liar.”

What Davis went through is a frustratingly familiar story to Rod Landman, an expert in this area at ARC England, a charity which deals with learning disabilities and autism.

“Mate crime”, a loose term for this type of exploitation, typically happens to people who are vulnerable in some way, he says, and victims are often older people and those with learning disabilities and autism. But it is not restricted to those groups.

Many victims suffer from loneliness and isolation, he says, and want the validation that friendships with other people can bring.

“The prospect of life without friendship is a pretty bleak one, and the sorts of things people are prepared to put up with in order to have someone in their life that they regard as being a friend are pretty extreme,” he says.

In 2006, 38-year-old Steven Hoskin died in Cornwall after he was forced to fall from a 100ft railway viaduct by a couple who had moved into his flat and tortured and humiliated him.

More everyday examples could be people turning up on the day that benefits are paid to “help” recipients to the ATM, or to spend their money.

Everyday mate crime is hugely under-reported, says Landman, and there are now more opportunities for people to become victims as a result of social networking.

Signs that there may be a problem include when someone might have less money than they should be expected to have, or does not have enough money to eat, says Ali Gunn of United Response, a social care charity. The Crown Prosecution Service puts it within the terms of hate crime, where people are targeted for their race, religion, nationality or other protected characteristics.

Davis finally found some relief when a counsellor told her that she was in an emotionally and financially abusive relationship. Then she told a friend who had noticed how stressed she was at home.

“There were moments where I deluded myself into thinking that I am such a good person for ‘helping people’. Then I had moments where I did not dare to leave my room because I was concerned about him harassing me.

“I saw no way for me to exit the situation and say ‘no’ to any of his requests, since these would be met with him getting intense and emotionally abusive in the house, and I was acutely suicidal.”

A charity told her she needed to throw him out, and she gathered the courage to do so last year, but she is now more than £30,000 out of pocket because of her contributions to him.

“With my flatmate now, the cleaning complaints also seem to have magically vanished,” she says. “If I had not sought help, I would still be in this situation.”

* Name has been changed. Some details have been withheld to protect the identity of the victim