Ex-Corrie actress Susie Blake has spoken about the upsetting way her stepfather spent his final months.
The star, who played popular Bev Unwin in the long-running soap between 2003 and 2015, talked about the difficulty her stepfather Victor Platt had with some ‘cowboy builders’.
She described how two unscrupulous workers targeted the 96-year-old and harassed him about having unnecessary work done on his home, which damaged Victor’s confidence to the point he didn’t want to leave the house.
It’s reported in Daily Mail that two men targeted Victor while he was out walking in London in September 2016.
They told Victor his home had been flooded, found out his address and followed him home, where they attempted to convince him to pay them to carry out “repair” work.
At the time, Victor – who had been an actor before joining the war effort as a rear gunner in World War II – struggled with his hearing and sight.
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Allegedly, the conmen threw soup on Victor’s ceiling, to make it look as if his pipes had burst, and that they could fix them.
As they were wearing official-looking high-visibility jackets, Victor complied. After that, they pestered Victor with a string of phone calls looking for payment.
Talking about the harrowing time, Susie said: “I found Victor very agitated. I could hear him talking about money with them. He passed the phone to me. I said I was his stepdaughter and they hung up.”
Susie also discussed how the events affected Victor, who passed away in January this year, saying: “He became listless and fearful, which was not in his nature.
“He lost his appetite. He used to go out every day, he was fit as a fiddle. But he became sedentary… he was now fearful of being taken for a fool.”
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“I think it was the cause of him just fading away… he just gave up. He wasn’t interested in living any more.”
The fraudsters were eventually jailed for four years and three months, for targeting six elderly victims in total.