Anna Rowe is petitioning the Government to make the act of “catfishing” a crime, after discovering her relationship of over a year wasn’t all it seemed.
On Rowe’s Change.org petition page, she describes her experience of a 14-month relationship with a man whose “behaviour was definitely premeditated showing his intent to use women, yet the current law will not find his actions a criminal offence”.
So, what is catfishing? It’s when a person sets up a profile on a social networking or dating site which is misleading or false in order to lure someone into a relationship.
The practice became prominent after a 2010 documentary by Nev Schulman, in which he was filmed through the process of starting a passionate online relationship, only to find the woman he was falling for wasn’t who she said she was.
Schulman later went on to star in an MTV series in which he helped people find out if they were being catfished.
Rowe says she was the victim of a man who set up a profile under the name of Antony Ray, which used pictures of Bollywood star Saif Ali Ray.
However, “after 14 months, I discovered not only was his ‘Antony Ray’ identity fake but he was married and had a dedicated phone for his conquests under his fake life,” says Rowe on the petition page.
“During our entire relationship he was seeing other women, claiming to be away working in Europe. He spent his weekends with his wife and children, not his parents where he claimed his mum had been diagnosed with cancer.”
Although there are some measures to prosecute people who use fake personas online for their own gain – for instance if they ask the person they are deceiving for money or post intimate pictures of that person online – Rowe says they do not go far enough.
The petition has 450 supporters so far.
