To some, Alec Couros is a charismatic oil contractor from Nashville, Tennessee. To others, he’s a well-travelled civil engineer from England.
After seven years and two beautiful children, his marriage ended in an amicable divorce. Or maybe his wife died. It depends on who you ask.
Thousands of women, from Brazil to the United States, believe he is their one and only; star-crossed lovers brought together by fate.
They’ve invested time and money into making the relationship work.
The only problem is, the man behind the keyboard isn’t actually Alec.
For more than a decade, he has been the unwitting face of a global online “catfishing” scam.
‘You’re basically given a victim list’
To this day, Alec isn’t sure why he (or rather, his pictures) were chosen — or what backstory the scammers might settle on, on any given day.
But he traces it back to sometime in 2007, when he received a “frantic call” from his then-partner, questioning why a woman they had never met was contacting him on Facebook, lamenting the end of their relationship.
He initially wrote it off as a prank, but within three months, more women were coming out of the woodwork.
“[They were] typically quite upset because they thought I had been in a relationship with them and sometimes took money from them and then ghosted them,” he told the ABC.
“It’s been about 13 or 14 years, and I get two or three a day [victims coming forward].”
Alec, who lives in Canada, now estimates the number of victims to be in the thousands — most of whom matched with “him” on social networking or dating sites.
Others were targeted through less detectable avenues, like the online game Words With Friends, where scammers use the benign nature of the platform to develop a rapport with victims.
In some cases, they will even create fake accounts using pictures of Alec’s daughter, parents and brother to foster a sense of authenticity.
“Sometimes the scammers will speak to me and I try and get some insight into what they do,” Alec says.
“If they want to look for a middle-aged woman to trick, they might look for the most popular names from 50 years ago in their region.
“Doris for instance, you put Doris, widow or divorced into Facebook, and you’re basically given a victim list.”
‘They genuinely thought it was me’
Catfishing cons are hardly a new phenomenon.
Australians were duped out of more than $28 million in romance scams last year, while 376 reports were made in January alone, netting a total loss of $1.4 million.
But while most scammers follow the same formula, their victims are vast and varied.
In fact, about 20 per cent of those who reported being scammed last year were under the age of 34.
It is of little surprise to Brisbane-based actress Emma Reynolds, 22, whose photos were stolen by a catfish to create Tinder and Instagram accounts under the fake identity Zoe Southgate.
The imposter was using the profiles in Sydney, purportedly under the belief that “nobody would come across the account”.
“But I actually lived in Sydney for a few years and I know a lot of people down there, so it was someone that knew me down there and was obviously using Tinder who found it,” she said.
“But they were actually catfishing this person, because they genuinely thought it was me.”
After urging her friends to report the Instagram profile, it was ultimately deleted.
But tracking down an account on Tinder is not so simple.
“That is the scary part about the Tinder thing, you can’t just search an account, so I couldn’t just search it and report it,” she said.
“They could have just deleted that account and made a new one, I’d have no idea.”
Fishing for the catfish
It is a quandary social media and dating networks are acutely aware of — and are working to combat, at least in some markets.
In a bid to prevent catfishing, Facebook introduced a download guard and watermark for its users in India, which aims to prevent others from downloading or sharing an image.
The social media giant claims the feature may reduce picture theft by about 75 per cent — but the image can still be captured via screenshot, and the design overlay is not available in Australia.
It has also started using facial-recognition technology that identifies when a fake profile tries to use someone else’s photos (“I still see many new fake profiles on a daily basis,” adds Alec, who briefly had his own Facebook account suspended because of the sheer number of people pretending to be him).
In the United States, Tinder has sought to introduce similar measures, asking users to take real-time selfies to verify their profile.
If this photo matches their profile picture, a blue verification checkmark appears on their account, letting others know “they’re the real deal”.
“All of these measures these companies have taken, why are they restricted [to some countries]?” says Ritesh Chugh, a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering and Technology at Central Queensland University.
“I understand we’re only 25 million people, but nonetheless, privacy is important for each one of us.”
‘Deception is a pattern of behaviour’
Born out of this perceived unwillingness by platforms to comprehensively tackle the problem, is a burgeoning industry — digital sleuthing.
From services like Social Catfish and the Catfish Detective, which promise to verify someone’s backstory, to paid websites designed to track down stolen images, there is growing demand to know if the person behind the screen really is who they say they are.
“If a person is lying about one thing, it’s very likely he or she will be lying about other things as well — deception is a pattern of behaviour,” says Lachlan Jarvis, director of Sydney-based investigation firm, Lyonswood Investigations & Forensics.
“When corresponding with someone online, it’s not just the risk of being defrauded that people need to consider, there is also the risk of identity fraud, hacking, burglary, sexual assault [and] money laundering.”
Other times, the motivations are far less nefarious.
In a study undertaken by researchers at the University of Queensland, self-identified catfish were asked why they set out to dupe other people.
And by and large, it was because they were lonely.
“Most of these catfish have no intent of causing harm to someone else,” says Dr Eric Vanman, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Queensland.
“They start off being innocently lonely or sad, and they just wanted to talk to someone else, or maybe they had to lie to get into a particular group.
“And then what happens is they get caught into that lie. And for whatever reason, they kept perpetuating this relationship.”
So you’ve caught a catfish — now what?
As Alec knows all too well, catching a catfish is only the beginning of the problem.
Victims — both those who have been duped, and those who have had their photos stolen — often find themselves floundering in a legal grey area.
Jurisdictional boundaries mean there is little recourse for those who have invested their time, money and emotions into a catfish, while those who have unwittingly become the face of such scams are left to clean up the mess, long after the imposter has faded into anonymity.
“There’s a man in Russia who’s been sending me legal documents,” Alec remarks.
“Apparently the imposter put him in debt for some sort of big investment, and he’s been after me ever since, and threatening to put me in jail in Russia.”
There are also broader questions around who actually owns a photo — even if it’s your own.
“We own intellectual property, but by using these services [Facebook etc] we are granting to these service providers the right to post, use, reproduce, adapt, publish and distribute our information,” Dr Chugh says.
“So yes, we are the owner, but essentially by using their services, we have given our rights to them.”
‘You’ve been the target of a romance scam’
With few legal avenues to pursue justice, Alec has taken matters into his own hands.
He has developed a website documenting the scammers’ strategies where he is able to redirect victims when they inexorably find him.
“If I have shared this page with you, there is a good chance that you’ve been the target of a romance scam (aka catfishing) and may have been led to believe that you are in a relationship with someone who looks like me,” the website reads.
He is also using his platform as a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina to draw attention to the catfishing phenomenon, while pushing for social media and dating networks to play a bigger role in preventing and removing fake accounts (“There’s not a lot of avenues to take up this thing, they’re not legislated very well,” he adds).
Despite this, it would seem — for the meantime at least — that the problem is destined to continue unabated. And while he has learned to live with it, it’s left a mark nonetheless.
“Sometimes [victims] find me before they’ve given money, but in most cases they’re invested emotionally,” he says.
“A lot of them tell me it’s not about the money they’ve given up, they just feel incredibly duped and heartbroken.”