Strictly Come Dancing winner breaks down in tears after being duped by scam

Metro

20-07-2025

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Strictly Come Dancing star Ore Oduba said he 'feels like a fool' as he emotionally recounted his close-call scamming experience in a bid to help others.
The 39-year-old TV presenter took to Instagram with a six-minute video to his followers explaining how his dream podcast invite quickly turned into a nightmare after he realised it was fake.
Oduba started the video explaining that he has been a long-time fan of acclaimed self-help author Mel Robbins, the writer of the bestselling book The Let Them Theory, and even attributed it with changing his life.
After discussing the impact the Robbins has had on his life on Loose Women, he reposted the interview on his social media, tagging Robbins (who also hosts a hugely popular podcast) in the post.
Soon after, Oduba received an email from someone alleging to be from the motivational guru (and her team) thanking him for his words and asking him to share more about how the theory had changed his life,
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'I could have cried,' Oduba told his followers. https://www.instagram.com/p/DMUfa3pNZui/
He continued: 'Had I been wise enough, I would have seen there were a couple of things that were a little bit off.
A week later, he was invited as a guest on her podcast.
Recounting what it meant to receive this invitation, he started to become visibly emotional.
'Do you even know what it means? It just felt very powerful to have got that message at that time. And it's terrible because I'm reading this back and I know exactly how it made me feel at the time,' he said through tears.
'I absolutely lost my s**t in tears on an Avanti West Coast train from Birmingham to London, thinking that my whole life was about to change,' he added, admitting that he went on to share more personal stories on the email chain.
After being asked by the person over email to keep this between the two of them, Oduba grew suspicious and started to notice discrepancies such as Mel being spelt 'Mell' and a Chat GPT style tone to the correspondence.
It was then he discovered a section on Mel Robbins' official website where you could check if you were being scammed by someone claiming to be someone from her podcast – after which it confirmed he was a victim of this scam.
The media personality reminded his followers that he used to host a programme about scammers, BBC's Claimed and Shamed, and that he has 'watched enough Watchdog to last a lifetime'.
'That doesn't stop me from being in the middle of it. I never thought I would be a person that would be scammed,' he added as he expressed his concern at how easy it is for 'more vulnerable' people to dig themselves into holes they can't get out of.
'I just feel like such an idiot. Let it be a lesson that, unfortunately, while Mel and her team are wonderful and doing incredible things there are a whole bunch of people trying to make all of us into absolute mugs.
'I feel like a fool. I got scammed by a fake Mel Robbins,' he concluded.
People have shared their sympathy in the comments.
Fellow presenter Sean Fletcher commented: 'So sorry to hear this Ore. I was excited and then so gutted for you listening to this. Important to share your story. Hope you're ok.'
Amandakbarnfield, echoed: 'Huge props for sharing this – it will hugely help so many people.'
'Very brave to have shared this and very noble to have done so to warn others. That's the biggest takeaway from this,' yviemck1978 agreed. More Trending
Last year, Oduba, who rose to fame on Newsround, spoke about the pitfalls of his decision to step back from presenting and focus on his musical theatre career.
There was one point at the end of last year where he had no work lined up for the whole of 2025 until he finally secured a role in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (which happened earlier this year).
He told the Sun: 'Up until that point, I was basically unemployed for all of 2025. It's just quite terrifying. It's the self-employed life.
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'Especially when contracts can be quite long periods. And if you're holding out for something and you haven't got that big chunk taken up, it just looks really freaking empty. So, we've gotten very fortunate to have panto.'
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