What started as a fairytale love story quickly became a cautionary tale with a very unhappy ending.

A Sydney Live listener has chosen to share her story of being duped in a visa love-scam in the hope it will act as a warning to others.

Jenny (not her real name) thought she had met the love of her life, only to be left scammed out of thousands of dollars, allegedly threatened and left emotionally and mentally shattered.

Jenny originally met Giovani (also not his real name) in Sydney and they quickly fell madly in love.

“To be honest with you, I thought all my dreams had come true, this man was just perfect in every way,” she tells Ben Fordham.

“He treated me so incredibly well, better than anyone had ever done in their life.”

Within a handful of weeks, Jenny says he told her “he was completely in love with me and wanted to take me back to Italy to meet his family”.

Three months later, he proposed to her in Italy and they married not long after in Australia.

After getting married, Jenny helped bring Giovani’s family out to Australia and even funded a restaurant to be run by his family.

However, this is when it all began to unravel.

It ended with Jenny arriving home from a stay in hospital to a house entirely cleared out.

“Everything was taken, and I mean absolutely everything like they had never even existed there,” Jenny tells Ben.

Click PLAY below to hear the entire cautionary tale

The immigration department has since told Jenny her “story is not that uncommon… in Australia”.

Jenny admits to Ben she feels like she’s “been screwed over” and her message to others out there in a similar situation is “don’t allow yourself to be isolated”.