As a 20-something fashion designer and stylist from the UK living the high life in Dubai, Leah Palmer seemingly has it all.
She’s attractive, vivacious and sociable, and on talking terms with celebrities including the boy band JLS. More than 1,000 friends and fans follow her on her multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Many have complimented her on the hundreds of selfies she has posted over the past three years.
Some men may have even spotted her on a popular dating app. A handful – including a semi-famous British boxer – have been lucky enough to form relationships with her. One finished with a long-term partner after falling in love with the bubbly brunette.
But there’s just one slight problem. Leah Palmer doesn’t actually exist.
All those profiles are fake. And here’s the truly terrifying bit: every single picture on them – and many of the details of Leah’s supposed life – have been stolen from the Facebook account of a regular 25-year-old Dubai resident who, until recently, had no idea.
Ruth Palmer is a health insurance manager who moved to Dubai, with husband Ben Graves, from Brighton, UK, last year.
In January this year, she stumbled upon one of the fake profiles after a friend said she’d noticed her picture on an Instagram account but felt the owner of the profile was not Ruth. Then, over the course of a horrifying two days, Ruth discovered that for the past three years, someone, somewhere had routinely been lifting photographs of her, her family and her friends, and then using them to establish the network of “Leah” lies. Deception was such that the imposter had even created fake accounts for Ruth’s mum and best friend to make things seem more realistic. The three would regularly “talk” with each other online.
Most worrying, perhaps, is that even as the websites have been informed and the false profiles removed, new ones continue to pop up.
Four months on from her initial discovery, and Ruth still has no idea who is hijacking her life, nor why. Indeed, the deeper she has dug, the more confusing – and disturbing – the case has become...
‘It’s just the most bizarre thing you could imagine happening,’ says Ruth as we sit in a Jumeirah Lake Towers (JLT) coffee shop. ‘At first, I was bewildered – I just couldn’t really get my head round it. For a few days when we discovered this, I was just in disbelief. Confused. Scared. This person seemed to know so much about me, I felt vulnerable.
There was someone out there living this complex online life as me. How do you even begin to comprehend that?
‘But then I just got angry. Now, I’m sort of blasé – I’m not going to let it affect me – but I will find them. I will find out who’s behind this.’
She informed the British police and asked them to investigate. She did so because someone had routinely been hijacking her images for three years and so she felt a crime had been committed. But they told Ruth that they can’t help. This can’t be classed as identity fraud because there’s been no fraud.
As far as the letter of the law goes, nothing officially has been done wrong. Officers offered victim support but told her they could not investigate. Copyright regarding the lifted pictures may be an issue but this is a civil matter and not a criminal offence, she was informed. She contacted Facebook who after examining the case, shut down the page. But a week later the imposter set it up again.
And yet, the whole story is ominously murky...
Things first came to light one evening in January. After a day at work, Ruth was at her JLT apartment waiting for Ben, 25, when she received a text from an old university friend back in the UK. The friend said she’d noticed a picture of Ruth on an Instagram account. For some reason she had looked more closely and realised the owner of the profile was in fact not Ruth, but an imposter.
‘I tried to look at it myself but – here’s the first weird part – this person had preemptively blocked me,’ says Ruth. ‘I couldn’t access the profile. Neither could Ben because he’d been blocked too. So too had my family and a lot of close friends.
‘Before we even knew this person existed, she had – I know it’s a woman because I spoke to her once over the phone – taken measures to stop us seeing that she was using my pictures. It was so calculating.’
Other friends trawled the account, sending Ruth screen grabs of hundreds of pictures featuring her. Some dated back to her university days. The account itself had existed two years. Captions were creepy in their casualness. One picture showed Ruth looking in a mirror. ‘Imagine having two Leahs,’ the imposter had written below with a range of emojis.
Among the more disturbing facets were pictures of Ruth with Ben. In these, “Leah” had called him her ‘psychotic ex-boyfriend’. There was a suggestion he’d been physically violent towards her.
‘Imagine if someone had seen that and then seen me and Ben together,’ says Ruth. ‘Imagine the problems that could have caused him.’
Things got stranger when it became apparent Instagram was not the only platform Ruth’s double was using. By trawling through the profile, her friends found that the fake was also on Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Viber.
Her followers and friends far exceeded Ruth’s own numbers. ‘Whoever it is,’ she notes, ‘I’ll give her credit, she’s an effective online social networker. On Twitter, there were messages – and replies – to celebrities such as the boy band JLS.
‘There was one exchange where she wrote to [UK television presenter and writer] Dawn O’Porter something like, “Oh, I’ll be free when you’re in London next week, let me come and style you.” And Dawn had replied telling her to send a private message and they’d arrange it. Who knows what happened?’
She had also been in regular contact with a number of men, including models, a boxer and a golfer – who have all asked not to be named. ‘I wrote to one and explained what was happening,’ says Ruth. ‘He said, “We need to talk,” and so we skyped – with Ben by my side. He told me, “I’ve been speaking to this person online for almost two years. I thought we were in a relationship [because of the intimate nature of the messages]. How can she not be real?” He was embarrassed. ‘They’d talk on the phone and exchange intimate photos with each other. It makes me cringe. He said they’d arrange to meet but then something would come up and she’d cancel at the last minute. It was like watching someone go through a break up.’
At one point, “Leah” even put him on the phone to two of her friends. ‘That means there’s at least two people who knew what she was doing,’ shudders Ruth. ‘And they are part of this now. They know who she is.’
Another besotted man had finished a real-life relationship after falling in love with “Leah”. ‘When we spoke he was heartbroken,’ recalls Ruth. ‘I don’t know why he never got suspicious. In some of the photos she had used I’m even wearing my wedding ring.’
Another said he’d met her on a dating app. ‘I didn’t even know about the app,’ says Ruth. ‘I’m married. The mind boggles.’ One of these spurned online lovers gave Ruth the number he had for “Leah”. A second produced another number. She had at least two mobiles to carry off the deception, it seems. Both were connected to WhatsApp, which means that both were smartphones.
‘I tried calling her,’ says Ruth. ‘The first time she picked up and when I said “hello” she hung up straight away. That was it. Just “hello”. I must have tried calling her about 200 times after that – both numbers.
‘No more were answered. I sent her dozens of WhatsApp messages saying that I wanted to talk to her and I could see they were read, but no reply. I wrote to her, “We need to talk, I just want to know who you are, it will be better for you to speak to me now because I will find you somehow.”’
After a week, both phone lines went dead. Ruth then contacted a private investigator. He listened to her tale, but told her he didn’t think he could get results.
Only a journalist from a well-known global website has offered to help crack the case. ‘We have teams who can get to the bottom of this,’ he told Ruth. She’s provided him with all the information she’s already dug up.
‘The thing is, if he finds her – and I think he will – she will be publicly humiliated,’ says Ruth.
A worrying thought is that the perpetrator might be someone Ruth knows.
Her only social media accounts – Facebook and Instagram – have always been private, until a week ago. That means only friends had access. ‘At first I wondered if I’d been hacked but I was assured by the companies that I hadn’t been,’ she says. ‘And yet I can’t think of anyone who would want to do this. I cleansed my friends list on Facebook but I’m not going to delete my profile. I’m an expat and it’s a great way to stay in touch with people. I’m not going to let this person win by changing my habits.’
So what now? Ruth says she’s stopped looking for new Leah profiles (‘it’s too much like bash-a-mole’). She doesn’t want to waste her time. ‘Unlike whoever this person is – who clearly has way too much time on her hands – I actually have a life to lead,’ she says.
‘I suppose it’s kind of a compliment that she’s used my pictures to create this glamorous alter ego. But, you know, I’d appreciate it if she’d stop now.’
Stay safe online
Ruth Palmer didn’t know the term previously but she has been the victim of what’s called “catfishing”.
This describes the practice of someone using another person’s photographs – and sometimes identity – while online. Most commonly, it is one of the potential pitfalls of online dating.
The term comes from a 2010 film in which a man meets a woman on the internet who is not who she first appears to be.
But while this misrepresentation has become an increasingly problematic phenomenon with the rise of social networks, there are still ways to protect your pictures and personal details.
‘If you put something online, you can’t ever make it 100 per cent safe,’ says Tony Zabaneh, a senior internet security engineer based in Jumeirah Lake Towers. ‘But there are measures you can take to make it as secure as possible.
‘The most obvious is to use privacy settings. You wouldn’t leave your windows and doors unlocked so anyone could walk in and look round your house, so why would you leave your Facebook account open for anyone in the world to peer in? You should see your photos and your personal details as valuables that could be stolen.
‘The second thing is to make sure it’s only people you trust who can follow you. It’s no good having your privacy settings on if you allow anyone access. All it takes is one person to follow you for a few minutes and they can have your data downloaded on to their own system easily.
‘And don’t put anything on your profiles that you wouldn’t want the rest of the world to see.’
