FROM being fleeced out of life savings to getting duped into sexual relationships, increasing numbers of women are falling victim to scammers online.
So why aren’t law-enforcement agencies taking catfishing seriously?
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Fabulous investigates…
Jane’s* life fell apart the day her boyfriend of 10 months disappeared.
Ed* was due to take a flight from Germany to the UK, where they were starting a new life together. But he never arrived.
Jane had been catfished – the process by which scammers and liars create fake identities online to hoodwink others.
Ed had carefully built an online romance with vulnerable widow Jane, 50, rinsed her for over £100,000, and then disappeared.
“I got so low I started to have suicidal thoughts,” she tells Fabulous. “I didn’t want to be here any more.”
After first gaining prominence on the 2010 movie Catfish and subsequent MTV reality series of the same name, catfishing is now a digital-age epidemic.
Earlier this year, Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler documented one of the world’s most extreme catfish cases, while Tortoise Media’s podcast Sweet Bobby, which tells the story of Londoner Kirat Assi – who was manipulated into an online friendship for nearly 10 years by her cousin pretending to be someone else – has been downloaded more than 5 million times.
Facebook estimates that 16%…
