Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
His life, heart and soul
I had his back.”
Antony visit’s to Rough Common became infrequent. He arrived on May 3 – the last time Anna would see him for five months until she confronted him about his lies.
Work, his unwell mother and a troubled son were apparently getting in the way of their relationship.
By September of last year Anna sensed all was not well. The distance, the lack of the contact, the unanswered phone calls. It was too much to bear.
She took action and reloaded the Tinder app to her phone. There he was: Antony Ray, in action, again looking for women.
Anna was in emotional turmoil. Desperate for the truth, she created a fake profile and began communicating with Antony.
She said: “I found the match and pretended to be someone else. He gave the fake me the exact same speech that I had been given when we started chatting the summer before. He wanted a relationship, meaningful and passionate. It would be all or nothing from day one. “I let on after a day it was really me, and our relationship was over. He told me his head had been a mess over his mum, who by then he had also told me had had a series of mini strokes, some with lasting speech conditions. He wasn’t looking for a relationship until things were settled at home, maybe then we could start again.”
Then she found out who Antony really was, a top legal executive who spent his working week in the capital and his weekends at home with his family in the north of England.
She said: “His alias was a clever twist on his real name. Then I sat and cried and cried. “Worst of all was finding out he was married. Everything that hadn’t added up over the months, all the red flags and bad gut feelings over things that I had felt and pushed aside because I trusted him more than I did myself, or he had given me a reasonable answer to a question or I’d told myself I was being paranoid.”
Anna has been left devastated – and even after finding out the truth is struggling to come to terms with it.
But she insists her decision to go public is not motivated by any vindictiveness. She says the law needs to change and that she is far from the only person to have been duped as a result of catfishing.
She has started a petition. Its aim is straightforward: “Creating a fake online profile with the intent to use women or men for sex, should be a crime under the fraud act, communications act and sexual offences act.”
The longed-for relationship may have evaporated into nothing, but Anna has a new purpose.
To sign her petition log on to change.org and search “fake online profile” to find the petition started by Anna Rowe.