“Catfishing” sounds like an exciting hobby, but language can sometimes conceal the insidious nature of abuse. Perpetrators reel in victims by deceiving and manipulating them, pretending to be someone else and preying on their vulnerabilities to create emotional dependency. Then, when they have been duped into a relationship, they extract something from them – money or emotional pain. At least one in five people surveyed by BetMinded last year said they have been the victim of catfishing
Financial gain is often the driving force behind online dating scams. In the first quarter of 2021, romance fraud cost UK dating app users more than £73.9m according to Action Fraud, with online dating scams up a staggering 40% since the pandemic. A man was jailed for 12 months for lying about his identity and scamming two women out of out of more than £345,000.
However, money isn’t always the driving force behind catfishing. Sometimes these relationships are predicated on power and control. This is where UK law falls short. These are incidents of grooming and coercive control and should be seen through the lens of intimate partner violence. The state doesn’t prosecute catfishers for lying about who they are (their name, marital status, profession, address and so on) or for the untold amounts of psychological suffering caused. Police are certainly not equipped to deal with sophisticated catfishers and vulnerable victims. People who have fallen prey to catfishers have little to no recourse to seek justice.
This was seen very clearly in the podcast Sweet Bobby in which Kirat Assi described her relationship with the titular man, a charismatic doctor whom she spent hours speaking with each day (albeit they never met in person). But Bobby was not who he said he was – he was in fact Assi’s female cousin, Simran Bhogal, who had stolen the identity of the real Bobby.
The purpose of this catfishing was not to extract money from Assi, but seemingly to make her believe she was in an authentic, romantic relationship. But why? Assi described being controlled by Bobby as he monitored her movements and dictated her everyday life choices. She described the relationship as having a profound effect on her mental and physical health.
If this had of been a straightforward case of two authentic people in a relationship it would surely have screamed coercive control, which has been a criminal offence since 2015. Coercive behaviour is a pattern of acts to threaten, humiliate, intimidate, harm and punish a victim. Controlling behaviour means a pattern of behaviour to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from their support network and exploiting their capacities for personal gain. So why is catfishing treated any differently when most cases have the same elements of control and abuse as in relationships between two “real” people?
In this case, Bhogal deprived Assi of the means needed for independence, regulated her everyday behaviour to the extent that she was isolated, and trapped her in a make-believe relationship. However, the police said no crime had been committed. The police were locked into traditional ideas of abuse only being present in offline relationships between authentic partners rather than recognising that online relationships through catfishing can also constitute coercive control.
In another case, Anna Rowe met a man on Tinder and after a 14-month relationship she discovered his profile was fake and he was married. In a petition signed by over 50,000 people calling for catfishing to be criminalised, she said that the perpetrator “took advantage of my trust and took away my right to choose. Had I known, I would never have consented to a sexual relationship”. This is a powerful statement. The consequences of catfishing are so devastating that he took away her right to consent to sex.
Assi did not give up on pursuit of justice. She reached a settlement in a civil case against Bhogal for harassment, misuse of private information and data protection breaches. But it should never have been left to a victim of abuse to pursue her perpetrator in the civil courts. There is a duty on the state to hold perpetrators accountable for their abuse. Because of the state’s failure to criminalise catfishing, Assi had no choice but to embark on costly and time-consuming litigation without the same guarantees of anonymity as in the criminal courts, just to get a semblance of justice. But is money or a private, perfectly scripted apology really justice when the perpetrator carries on without a criminal record?
Even when victims claim financial payouts, they don’t always receive the money owed to them. I represented a woman who had been deceived and manipulated by a charming man online who scammed her out of her life savings; she was left financially destitute. While she won her claim in the civil courts, recouping her money was always going to be a losing battle because he claimed not to have a penny to his name.
People’s motivations for catfishing vary, but they have one thing in common – they cause victims irreparable emotional harm. Catfishing must become a specific criminal offence. Perpetrators need to be brought to justice for their deception, lies, manipulation and abuse that ruins people’s lives. It would send out a strong message to victims that the law will protect them and to perpetrators that they will be held accountable. But first, let’s start by calling it exactly what it is – control and exploitation, not catfishing.
Charlotte Proudman is an award-winning barrister specialising in violence against women and girls and a fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge