Haunted by a stranger who stole my life online
How an imposter used this executive’s photos to create a fantasy life and duped men into falling for the fake woman
AS SHE scrolled through the pictures her friend had sent her, Ruth Palmer recognised herself in every scene — the photographs of weddings, nights out and student parties all brought back happy memories. One detail though, was disturbingly unfamiliar.
The name on the Instagram account wasn’t Ruth’s, but a name she didn’t even recognise — Leah Palmer.
At first Ruth presumed there must have been some kind of technical glitch. But the more photos of herself she scrolled through, the more disturbed she became. For the truth was, a complete stranger had plundered Ruth’s social media accounts and used her photos to create a fictional persona online.
Ruth only discovered the hoax in January, but has since learned ‘Leah’ has spent the past three years routinely copying the photographs she posts on social networks of herself, her family and friends, and posting them on other sites, passing herself off as the girl at the centre of the pictures.
The fictitious Leah described herself as a pretty twentysomething singleton with a high-flying career and busy social life. She had a Facebook page and was registered on the dating app Tinder, where she exchanged flirty and seductive messages with her admirers, as well as several Twitter accounts and an Instagram photo-sharing account.
Ruth, however, is a 25-year-old happily married woman from Brighton, living with her husband Ben Graves in Dubai, where she works for a large multinational firm. And yet her real-life friends — and the holidays, weddings and fun nights out they shared — had become part of Leah’s fantasy world, appearing regularly in Leah’s frequent posts, shared with her hundreds of followers.
It’s an almost unfathomable deception and all the more chilling because Ruth still has no idea who was behind it and what the imposter’s motives were. All she knows is there’s a chance she knows the person because they had access to postings on her internet accounts, even when the privacy settings meant only friends could view or copy the pictures.
‘The worst part of all is not knowing who or why,’ she told the Mail last week. ‘Ultimately, I’m just a normal girl. I have a nice life but there’s nothing exceptional about it. Yet someone decided to target me and steal my life for no obvious reason. It’s an invasion of the highest degree and it’s horrible. I feel like I’m being watched the whole time.’
Normal she may be, but Ruth is a beautiful and sparky girl whose world may well inspire a degree of envy. After graduating from the University of Brighton in 2011, she started working for a large multi-national and was transferred to their Dubai office last year.
She set up home with her husband Ben, 26, and kept in touch with friends through updates on Facebook and Instagram. ‘I wouldn’t say I was an avid user of social media, but when you’re abroad it’s a great way of keeping in touch,’ says Ruth.
Like most internet-savvy twentysomethings, she also ensured her settings were private — meaning that only her friends could see them.
Yet this didn’t stop ‘Leah Palmer’ getting access to them. ‘To this day I don’t know how she did it,’ says Ruth.
For nearly three years — the time in which Leah Palmer has been operating — Ruth was blissfully unaware that someone was plundering her life. But in January she received a text message from a university friend accompanied by a photograph of the two of them together on a night out.
‘She asked me whether I’d seen this picture,’ Ruth recalls. ‘I was a bit confused at first, but then she asked me to look at the name of the account, which was an Instagram account in the name of Leah Palmer. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was freaked out, but couldn’t understand what was going on.’
Understandably anxious to discover who was using her pictures, Ruth tried to log on to the fake account herself, only to find whoever set it up had ‘blocked’ her so she couldn’t see it.
‘All I could do was contact as many friends as I could who are on Instagram and warn them.’
Ruth also contacted Instagram, asking for the site to be shut down, submitting her passport as proof of identity — only to find another almost identical account popped up days later.
Meanwhile, detective work by friends had revealed Instagram was only the tip of the iceberg: ‘Leah’ had also set up a Facebook page and several Twitter accounts all using pictures from Ruth’s life, as well as creating Twitter accounts for a fictional mum, ‘Scarlett Palmer’, and a fictional best friend, ‘Kate Harvey’, which was modelled on one of Ruth’s real friends.
‘Scarlett would comment on a lot of Leah’s photographs — things like “I can’t believe I created something so beautiful”,’ says Ruth. ‘That freaked me out no end. This person had created separate fake accounts that were talking to each other, while there were also lots of real people interacting with her on Twitter.’
Leah was posing as a fashion insider — at one point claiming to be a PA for designer Marc Jacobs, on another a stylist for the singer Cheryl Cole — and had attracted some high-profile names to her social media sites including a footballer, a club DJ who plays around the world and a former Big Brother contestant, all of whom exchanged direct messages, texts and phone calls with her. The TV presenter Dawn O’Porter, meanwhile, also once tweeted her in reply to one of her comments.
But, extraordinary as it sounds, ‘Leah’ was also conducting more intimate relationships too. ‘One guy had posted messages on her page saying “I miss you, gorgeous” and “Happy Valentine’s Day, Beautiful, can’t wait to spend ours together in a couple of days”, so I sent him a picture of myself and said, “I don’t know who you’ve been speaking to but I’m Ruth Palmer and I think we need to talk.”’
The subsequent telephone conversation — conducted over Skype with her husband at her side — left Ruth reeling. ‘This man was a semi-professional athlete and as far as he was concerned he’d been in a relationship with Leah for several months,’ she says.
The man told Ruth he’d met Leah online and had ended his real-life relationship for her, even though they’d never met. ‘ They would speak every night on the phone and she’d make, endless arrangements to go for dinner but then she’d always pull out saying she had to travel for work or any number of reasons,’ says Ruth.
Chillingly, many of the excuses were based on Ruth’s real life. ‘Some things she’d told him were things I’d done that same day — like going for brunch or meeting a friend for lunch.’
Leah was also telling more sinister lies too. ‘She told this guy who fell for her that she’d lost a brother and that she had an abusive, psychotic ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t leave her alone,’ says Ruth.
‘There were pictures of me with my husband on her social media accounts and she told this guy the man in the pictures was her late brother. It was the only way for her to explain why this guy was in some of her pictures, although she was also using it to get pity. It was sick.’
Ruth spent the next week contacting many of the people Leah was ‘friends’ with to find out how they knew her. They included a string of other men who also believed they were in a relationship with Leah.
‘They had exchanged explicit images with her — she’d used pictures of other people’s bodies she found online,’ Ruth recalls. ‘She’d sent Christmas cards, birthday cards and made dinner reservations for her online lovers and although she never turned up, they were all convinced she was real. When they were talking to me on Skype, after finding out the truth, you could see it was like someone going through a break-up.’
Young women, too, had been dragged into ‘Leah’s’ web of deceit, among them a young singer. ‘She told me story after story that Leah had spun. She’d said her brother had died, that she was a manic depressive. It was lie upon lie, although of course nobody knew.’
There was another shocking development. ‘Some of her online “friends” I spoke to said that Leah had put them on the phone to her mum and friends. Apparently these people all had different voices, meaning that other people were in on it. It was a horrible feeling.’
Determined to try and confront whoever was behind it all, Ruth called ‘Leah’ on the phone numbers she had given to her ‘boyfriends’ and friends. ‘She had two phones. The first one rang, she picked up and I said, “Hello”. I heard breathing but nothing was said and within two seconds she’d put the phone down,’ Ruth recalls.
‘I don’t know if she knew it was me — I didn’t say who I was. After that, I called her a crazy number of times to get her to pick up, and sent messages telling her I wasn’t going to let it drop until she told me who she was. But after a week, the numbers no longer worked.’
Just who was at the end of the line, of course, is the crucial question. ‘I honestly couldn’t work out who might be responsible,’ Ruth says.
‘I was racking my brains, wondering if there was anybody I’d annoyed, but there was nobody I could think of. Friends said it must be someone I knew, but I couldn’t understand who would
‘She claimed that my husband was her dead brother’ ‘I don’t know who she is — she must be really troubled’
have the time and energy to create a fake life. It must be someone deeply troubled. It was just so insane.’ Insane and also deeply disturbing. ‘It started to affect me quite badly,’ she admits. ‘I felt like I was being permanently watched. ’
Professor Sir Cary Cooper, a psychologist at Manchester University, isn’t surprised Ruth was scared.
‘This is a form of stalking and that leaves the person on the receiving end feeling incredibly vulnerable,’ he explains. ‘They have no control over what is going on, they can’t stop it, and the uncertainty leaks into every corner of their life.li They wonder, “Why me?” and that then leads them to examine their life, their friends.
‘On top of that they have to deal with the fear that it is going to escalate — while what they are experiencing is taking place in the online world they can’t know for sure that it won’t move into the real world. So it’s incredibly unsettling.’
He believes the person responsible is linked to Ruth by some connection.
‘Clearly this is a highly troubled person but I would be surprised if it was entirely random,’ he says. ‘My suspicion is that this person knows Ruth in some way. The interestingsting thing is that this person is in no way contacting Ruth directly — instead she is just using her life. That leads me to believe that it isn’t aimed at Ruth — she just hates her own life enough to take Ruth’s identity as her own. ‘
Ruth was so distressed that she reported Leah to Sussex police, who referred it to Action Fraud — the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and internet crime. But because Leah hadn’t used Ruth’s full name, it wasn’t classed as a crime.
A spokeswoman for Action Fraud said: ‘Identity theft is considered to be a criminal offence when a victim’s identity is stolen and then used by the fraudster for financial gain,’ she said.
But this doesn’t make it any easier for Ruth. Professor Sir Cary Cooper says: ‘It’s easy for most of us to understand fraud when it gets you somewhere — by, say, making financial gain. But just because there isn’t an obvious motive doesn’t mean this is any less distressing for the victim. The point is the victim does have a motive — we just don’t know what it is.’
Ruth resorted to hiring private detectives to track her down. ‘They couldn’t find her because there were non leads to follow — she’d used unregisteredis pay-as-you-go phones, so we couldn’tc track her,’ says Ruth.
The only thing in Ruth’s favour, in fa fact, was that ‘Leah Palmer’ was gett ting wind of the fact her cover was blown. ‘People were posting on her accounts telling her they knew she w was an imposter,’ says Ruth.
By the end of February, Ruth le learned that Leah had once again c contacted the young singer she had befriended to tell her she was coming off social media.
And that was the last anyone has h heard from her — for now.
‘As far as I know she’s disappeared,’ s says Ruth. ‘But who’s to say she’s not c created a different name with my photo and isn’t doing it all over again?’
Ruth believes there needs to be t tighter laws governing the misuse of s social media. ‘We’re living in a world where everything is online and it seems crazy to me that this is allowed to happen and no one seems able to do anything about it,’ she says.
‘I understand this is difficult territory but there has to be something we can do.’
In the meantime, she can only hope that Leah has gone for good. ‘I could drive myself mad wondering who she is, but I have to let go and hope that one day she’ll have the courage to own up,’ she says.
‘I want her to look me in the eye and realise how many lives she has upset with her trickery and deceit.’
Sadly, given the extent of Leah’s malicious duplicity, it seems unlikely.