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A model turned DJ, Liv Nervo had forged an enviable career travelling the world with her sister and musical collaborator, Mim. Old cliches about being a strong, independent woman and not needing a man aside, it’s clear that Liv already had a fantastic life before she met her former partner, Matthew. A successful businessman, their paths first crossed when she played a private party on Richard Branson’s Necker Island. “I thought I had found the best guy in the world,” she says. “But it was all a lie.”
So begins the second series of Love Cheats, a stark and shocking true-crime show about people who think they’ve found the love of their life but are instead being pulled into audacious romance scams. Series one featured a fraudster impersonating a member of the nobility while leaving their victims to foot the bill for their lavish life, and another faking terminal cancer. Series two keeps the bar for grim deception high, beginning with Liv’s whirlwind romance with Matthew, who was desperate to have a family with her. Mim was equally taken in by her sister’s devoted new partner, who had made his fortune selling honey but wasn’t a fusty corporate type. “[Liv] used to date men with a briefcase,” she clarifies. “I would never date a man with a briefcase!”
What’s intriguing about Liv’s case is that Matthew was actually wealthy, and his stories of business success and a billionaire mother back in New Zealand were true. Everything else, though, was fiction. Once Liv was pregnant, he became angry and withdrawn, and even skipped a gender-reveal party in Liv’s native Australia. So concerned was her mother, Flaviana, that she hired a private investigator to trail him. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that what was found – and how Liv used the information to inform her own investigation – was not very good.
Somehow – despite being heavily pregnant and finding out some of the worst news she could have imagined about the baby’s father – she had the wherewithal to record Matthew on her phone as she confronted him, and the audio is wild. He wasn’t leading a double life, Liv explains, “it was a triple life … I felt totally violated – mind, body and soul”. She feels she was deceived into having a child without knowing all of the facts, leading to questions around informed consent.
Easily the series’ most notable case, it’s probably not a coincidence that the producers chose to put Liv’s story at the start. As well as pursuing legal action against Matthew, she has since become an outspoken voice against reproductive coercion, working alongside the Good Law Project. There’s footage of Labour MP Natalie Fleet raising the issue in parliament, mentioning Liv by name. It is interesting and enraging, but it is also bigger than Love Cheats the series, and it feels as if we only scratch the surface when it comes to Liv’s activism.
Elsewhere, there’s Fiona Mulkerrins-Dixon from Exeter, who was taken in by the lies told by former partner Ben Millin. (Among them: a dead father who was actually alive, a dead sister who had never existed, and a heart condition that could kill him at any moment). Millin was in fact perpetrating what DC Claire Morgan of Avon and Somerset police describes as “a massive web of lies and deceit” that saw him extract huge amounts of money from different women. It’s less high-profile than Liv’s case, but no less terrifying – not least when Fiona thinks that an incommunicado Ben must be in a ditch somewhere, only to find out that he is in prison.
Love Cheats rarely elevates the true crime genre. As is in vogue in 2026, there’s some shaky use of AI here, too – uncanny valley face renderings and homes that look as if they’re made of Lego. It does, however, give a voice to people who are desperate to tell their stories – partly as catharsis, but also to warn others about how easy it is to be conned by people who aren’t so much love cheats as life cheats.
In Fiona’s case, Ben was convicted of fraud, and sentenced to 34 months in prison but served just five. It was so much more than just financial crime, she says, and something that will “sit with me for ever”. Natalie, who was conned by her former partner Stewart, says: “How do you trust people? How do you let people in? How do you move on?” Michelle, swindled by the same man, had some of her debts wiped but is still repaying more than £6,000. Sure, this is primarily intended as entertainment, but if it can also stop these grifters – or others – in their tracks, then it will also have done a multitude of good.
