Together they tell . . . The story you MUST read before falling in love online

Constance, 60, is distraught after discovering the charming man she fell for on a dating site had stolen a stranger’s picture . . . . . . the photo was of Steve, 46 – who’s married and gay – and says the conman’s used his identity to scam SEVEN other wom

HiS EYES were the first thing she noticed. ‘He had such lovely eyes and such an open smile,’ says Constance Wood. ‘And i thought, ooh, he does look like a nice man, and he has such a plausible story. i did think, if we get on, this is the sort of man i could really have a relationship with.’ Except, the man with the kind eyes who had contacted Constance on the dating site Zoosk — known as a good place to find single over-50s — wasn’t who he said he was. Not by a long shot. On his profile, he was ‘Martin Petersen’, a 58-year-old Danish-American widower.

During late- night chats, he’d tell Constance he was an ‘independent investor’, the son of a U.S. diplomat no less, who lived in North London, albeit in the slightly unlikely suburb of Hendon.

But none of it was true. ‘Petersen’ was, and still is, nothing but a fabrication, the mask worn by a man who sits behind a computer somewhere in the world and, with considerable skill both technological and psychological, grooms older middle-class women for their money.

in fact, the picture of the man with the gorgeous eyes belongs to Steve Bustin, a 46-year- old public speaking coach from Brighton, who’s been married to his husband John for eight years, and whose entire scrapbook of online photographs has been ruthlessly harvested by a crook.

Though they’ve spoken on the phone, Constance has never met Steve — until now, at the Mail’s photoshoot.

This is a story of so-called catfishing, where people use fake online profiles to attract others. Yet it’s not the usual tale of twentysomething vanity, where men (almost always men) steal other men’s modelling shots in order to attract

younger, ‘ sexier’ women. Constance’s experience is much more sinister than that. And it also has a rare twist, for she and Steve have banded together to expose ‘Petersen’ for the thief he is, and to stop him defrauding other older women.

It all began just after New Year, when Constance, 60, a Somerset-based artist and lecturer with four grown-up children, decided to dip her toe into the world of online dating. Her husband, a lawyer, had died suddenly three years before, and it felt like the time was right.

‘I’d watched two friends of mine do it very successfully,’ she says. ‘One’s even married to a man she met online. I wasn’t looking for that necessarily, but I did want someone to go to social functions with; I didn’t want to be the only one on my own at dinners and parties any more.’

Smart and beautiful, with long silver hair and twinkly eyes, Constance was contacted by lots of men on the site, but it was ‘Martin Petersen’, with his trustworthy smile, whose pitch she fell for. Quickly, they began to communicate.

‘Every morning he’d text, things like, “hope you have a lovely day” and “I’ll call you tonight”, and then we’d chat in the evening. With hindsight, it seems he had a “tick list” of subjects to talk about — questions like: do you play tennis, what kind of car do you have, do you like dark or milk chocolate, what clubs do you belong to?

‘He said he wanted to know everything about me in a romantic way; now I think he was working out whether I was the kind of woman worth his time. It was part of the fishing.’

Indeed, cybersecurity experts think it’s likely that a man like ‘Petersen’ grooms ten to 15 women at once, and keeps notebooks or even spreadsheets of information on each one so he can target his victims more precisely.

STEVE knows this already. His pictures have been used in at least seven dating scams, probably by the same man, who may also use the name ‘ Christian Hansen’ and the website Elite Singles.

It’s a danger not only of having an appealing face, but of using social media platforms as a shop window for business.

‘I’m a public speaker and Facebook is the forum we tend to use,’ says Steve, ‘so there’s a broad spectrum of information and pictures on my page, both business and personal. Before all this, because it was a great way to build my business, the settings on my page were public. It was easy for a con artist to construct an entire life from it.’

Worse, Steve has been told it’s likely his photographs are being sold on as a file to criminals, who buy generic online identities to use in various forms of fraud.

‘People assume their Facebook profile is theirs and they have ownership of it,’ he warns. ‘They don’t.’

For Constance, the most damaging aspect is psychological. ‘ Martin Petersen had such a gentle voice and he was always polite. When he asked me what the happiest and saddest times of my life were, I told him.

The time I held my first child, and the time my husband died in my arms. I was completely honest and I gave him real emotion and he came back with a story about losing his one-year- old daughter in some awful tragedy, and then his wife, to kidney disease.

‘It was all made up. He had a script. The picture he sent of his “late wife” was of Steve’s sister. It’s such a terrible abuse of trust.’

Yet it wasn’t long before ‘Martin Petersen’ began to slip up. He took to sending Constance music, gentle John Legend songs she loved and ‘would listen to in bed, thinking, what a lovely man to send me this’ even though her girlfriends told her ‘ men don’t usually do that sort of thing at our age’.

‘They said it was teenage stuff, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to listen to my friends. I liked it, and I even felt protective of him when they said that.’

For a moment she looks desperately sad. ‘I didn’t want to disbelieve it. Any of it. I suppose I fell in love with the dream, and also with him, or the idea of him anyway.

‘I had such a happy marriage to my husband, I didn’t think I’d ever want another man in my life. But just for a moment, I thought I’d found someone who I could have fun with. Someone rather gorgeous who could make me happy.’

Until, oddly, ‘Petersen’ sent her a rap song with dirty lyrics, ‘ which I immediately sent

back, saying, “look, enough of that, I don’t like it”. And he said straight back, “oh sorry, I remember now that’s not your sort of thing.” As if he’d made a mistake and got me muddled up with another woman.’

Her children started sounding a note of caution, but still Constance refused to listen and instead agreed to meet ‘Petersen’ at a cocktail bar in Windsor, a date the scammer could never keep without revealing his real identity.

His last- minute cancellation — using the excuse of a short notice business trip to Bahrain — was straight out of the catfishing playbook.

‘ But he was clever,’ says Constance, ‘and I was still fooled.’ She pauses, then admits: ‘I suppose I did hear what I wanted to hear. I’m not stupid, but I was more vulnerable than I thought. You get to my age and you still assume you know more about the world than your children, then it turns out you don’t.’

Yet maybe ‘ Petersen’ had met his match in Constance. One morning, three weeks into their ‘relationship’, he sent her a picture of his ‘breakfast in Bahrain’ — in fact, a ten-year-old photo of Steve on holiday, with a curly fringe, a crucial detail.

Later that same day, he sent her a photo of him in the pool (again Steve on holiday, but a more recent pic), this time with short hair.

‘I said to him, “what’s happened to your hair?”’ says Constance, ‘and he came back, quick as a flash, “oh, it was so hot, I had a haircut.”

But it wasn’t just that. He looked heavier in that second picture. Different. I started to go through all the photos, to zoom into the backgrounds. And then I did something I should have done right at the very start . . .’

Convinced there were holes in his story, she decided to hunt her man down like a detective.

Untrained in computers, Constance nevertheless looked online for ways to verify photographs and came up with a service called Google Reverse Image Search, a means of dragging and dropping photographs into a search box to see if matches are found anywhere on the internet.

‘The first three pictures I tried were from Steve’s Facebook page and didn’t come up with a match. But then I tried one “Petersen” had sent me of “him” in a suit, a business photo. Within seconds, there I was, looking at Steve Bustin’s business website.

‘ It was surreal. I felt sick. I remember sitting there gazing at it all. It felt like I’d lost a romance, that this love affair was over, even though of course it was never real. To be honest, it felt like I’d been dumped. I can’t tell you how much this messes with your head.’

CONSTANCE’S computer-niece started to find out everything she could about Steve ‘and came back to tell me that not only was he married, but he had a husband — a double whammy’.

After the devastating realisation that the emotional affair she’d so enjoyed was a sham, came another equally powerful feeling: ‘I thought, I wonder if he’s doing this to other women? And then I thought, I’m going to get him.’

The first step was a phone call to Steve. It was followed by several more, but our shoot was the first time they’d met in person.

Arriving at the photographic studio first, Constance admits to feeling — slightly irrationally — nervous at meeting Steve, this man whose image was used to manipulate and fool her.

But when Steve arrives they immediately hug and laugh, and start planning a glass of wine to toast the unmasking of ‘Martin Petersen’.

‘You were brilliant,’ Steve says to her. ‘I took this phone call and the first thing you said was: “Hello, you don’t know me, but I thought I knew you . . .”’

However, to Constance the days after that call felt as though she’d fallen down a rabbit hole. When she confronted ‘Martin Petersen’ over the phone, he told her it was Steve who was the liar.

‘He said: “He’s the imposter. I’m going to have him shut down. I’m going to prove to you that I’m the real guy.”’

The ball was in ‘Petersen’s’ court and his next move was hugely audacious. Using a video Steve had once made for marketing purposes, which was tucked away on an obscure website not related to any of Steve’s usual online activity, the scammer pretended to talk to Constance in real time over the online call service Skype.

not only had he found this longforgotten piece of video, he cleverly edited it to make it look as though the internet connection kept dropping out; he superimposed his own Scandinavian-inflected voice over it and streamed it as though he was live via Skype.

Wisely, Constance recorded it, and watching it with Steve at the shoot is a strange experience. This is footage of the man sitting in front of us apparently speaking with a different voice. ‘That,’ Steve says, shaking his head bitterly, ‘feels very close to home.’

‘It made my head spin,’ says Constance ‘It was the closest I came to wondering who was real and who wasn’t.’

Almost immediately afterwards, she was sent a picture of a U.S. passport with Steve’s head photoshopped on to the personal details page. ‘ Martin Petersen’ was not going to give up his investment in Constance easily.

So she and Steve plotted. She agreed to play along with ‘Petersen’ for a few more days while they both contacted Action Fraud, the national cybercrime reporting service.

Constance apologised to ‘Petersen’ for doubting him, and he ‘very politely’ accepted her apology. Clearly sensing she was on the verge of rumbling him, however, ‘ Petersen’ appeared to accelerate his plan. ‘ The next thing I knew, he sent me a picture purporting to be him with an injured eye. He said he was in hospital, still in Bahrain.’

‘It was obviously a picture of me,’ says Steve. ‘I hurt my eye on a rose bush a few years ago. It must have been on Facebook.’

Shortly after, at the very beginning of this month, the scammer sent her three photos of a crashed car with no number plate and the cryptic message: ‘I’m in real serious trouble . . .’

It was the obvious prelude to a request for money to pay a hospital bill, but by now weary of all the multiplying layers of deceit, Constance decided to pull the plug once and for all.

‘I told him I knew he wasn’t who he said he was. I told him if he ever tried to use Steve Bustin’s images again, he really would be in serious trouble. ‘He hasn’t contacted me since.’ She is glad it’s over, though a tiny part of her is still heartbroken. Her version of the man with the kind eyes never really existed, after all.

‘I had to meet Steve in the flesh,’ she says. ‘I had to do it for me. Because even though I know he’s the real one, until this moment, they’ve both been virtual people.

‘I’ll never go on an online dating site again,’ she adds firmly. Instead, her girlfriends are rallying round and making an extra effort to find a real, offline date for her.

Indeed, Constance is lucky. She has family looking out for her, and says she’d never have given money to ‘ Petersen’ anyway, though at his behest she had downloaded the chat app Telegram, a Russian developed messenger service that can be used to transfer money between bank accounts.

BUT who knows how many other women looking for love have fallen for the scam? ‘I’d love to track him down, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible,’ she says. The police can’t do much, it seems, until money is stolen, though the theft of Steve’s identity is a crime. Above all, they both want to stop this nightmarish experience happening to anyone else.

‘The dating websites need to take more responsibility and do proper checks on profiles,’ says Steve. ‘ Zoosk says it has verification procedures in place, but they’re clearly not working.’

When the Mail approached Zoosk, a spokesman insisted it took ‘incidents like this very seriously’, and that it was leading the way ‘in the fight against romance scammers and catfishing’ with its photo verification procedures, though using them is not a precondition of creating a profile.

‘Zoosk monitors usage patterns, prevents many fraudulent accounts from being created and blocks users with suspicious behaviour,’ he said, but admitted ‘these measures are not foolproof.’

Steve and Constance plan to keep in touch, and want other women who think they might have been scammed by the same man — ‘Petersen’ or ‘Hansen’ — to get in touch too.

And not only to help them get justice. ‘I’m going to throw a big party,’ says Steve, ‘and invite lots of single — and straight — men along for them.’

Constance smiles at him. ‘ He really is lovely isn’t he? I knew he would be.’