Family problems, he said, buying her a gift this time to apologise.
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It was a bottle of perfume, a scent Claire liked. Seb handwrote a note — "Why would I buy you a bottle of perfume if I had no intention of meeting you? Claire has looked at this image many times since; surely more times than Seb ever did. She has brought her laptop with her to Pembrokeshire, and on its hard drive, among hundreds of files relating to Seb, the picture of the perfume bottle is the most revealing.
It shows a reflection of someone leaning in, holding a camera, taking the photograph. Studying the image on her laptop, zooming, squinting, Claire saw that the person she had fallen for was never slender with brown hair. No glasses, no beard. Instead this was someone blonde, double-chinned, with large, puffy arms.
Claire saw a woman. The internet is famously well arranged for deception.
Most of us have encountered its cons — that distant prince, keen to share his boundless treasure in return for one or two small loans. Online dating has tricks all its own, even if most are harmless. A survey by OK Cupid in found that the majority of its 1. There are sometimes more radical embellishments. In America people have been fascinated for months by the story of Manti Te'o, an American football player whose girlfriend, met online, turned out not to exist. The precise details of the case are still not clear, but a fellow player suggested Te'o had been " catfished " — a reference to the documentary Catfish , about a New York man who believed he was involved in an online relationship with a girl in Michigan.
More and more, it seems, love is being offered on the internet, and offered dishonestly. Being stood up repeatedly was one thing, but the photograph frightened her. Claire was writing a blog about dating at the time, and picked over the stranger elements of the affair for a series of articles. Seb liked to email photographs of himself doing dramatic things — snorkelling, paintballing, shaping his hair into a mohawk in the bath — and he also sent lots of photos of handwritten messages.
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One was a spider-gram, drawn carefully in red felt-tip and listing "Things I like or love". Teaching, roast dinners, football, bottled Bud, Cortinas, Claire. It almost read like a list of prompts. Claire wrote about Seb's voice, its "smooth Welsh tones", and mentioned other details such as the four-bedroom Marylebone home he owned and a beloved niece who lived back in Wales. Seb once had a girlfriend who died of cancer and his best friend, Philip, was severely disabled. Claire published her blogs in June Before long, emails started to come. She heard from Rachel Burton, a year-old ward sister who had been in a relationship with Sebastian Pritchard-Jones, too.
Rachel and Seb first met on Smooch, going on to speak to each other for hours on the phone. Rachel recognised Claire's mention of Marylebone, the beloved niece, the girlfriend who'd died of cancer, the disabled best friend. Ali Moores, a year-old who worked in recruitment and who'd met Sebastian Pritchard-Jones through Guardian Soulmates, recognised Claire's description, too, only the Seb she'd known had angular eyebrows and spiked, caramel-coloured hair. The emails kept arriving. The Seb that Danielle had fallen for was dark with a square jaw, the same man that Claire had seen in photographs.
When Karen a year-old who worked in the media and Susan 35, a marketing manager from Derbyshire contacted Claire, they said they recognised the photographs but not the name. They knew him as Harvey. Different names, different faces, unmistakably one person. They'd all got used to late-night drunken calls in which songs were sung down the phone, mostly football chants, though Rachel got hymns. Karen received roses; so did Susan. Ali was sent money to shop for clothes and booked into a hotel at Seb's expense.
They'd all been told about the teaching job, soon to yield a promotion, and a disabled best mate, Philip. He dominated my life. They had phone sex. We talked about having kids.
The hoaxer who breaks women's hearts
Danielle had been promised a trip to New York. Seb told her he'd collect her on his way to the airport. I remember her texting me: I'd watched the Catfish documentary. I even said to him: The photographs Joanna had been sent were different again this man had sideburns and a slightly bulbous nose , but she recognised the person Claire described. Joanna had been told his name was Harry. The relationship, telephone-based, lasted for months.
Joanna was in the middle of a shift at the O2 Arena when I spoke to her, busily preparing food between gigs for Alicia Keys and Barbra Streisand. I couldn't imagine her being taken in by internet scams that distant prince.
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Every one of the women I spoke to seemed balanced and bright. Joanna was fooled at a particularly cruel time in her life. He [the hoaxer] said: It had a Pembrokeshire postmark. Claire and I have come here with no definite plan as to how to find who we're looking for.
We drive and then walk around the village and keep remarking on how deserted it feels. As far as she can tell, the hoaxing began in January , with Susan. Then Karen, Ali and Rachel. Claire and Danielle were "suckered" Danielle's phrase in Joanna's relationship lasted until summer Other women have come forward to speak to Claire, too, filling in gaps in the chronology. This hoaxer was loyal. Everyone's relationship tended to end the same way, usually with some clinching failure to meet, or the implausible stories too thickly piled to ignore.
Angry, quite threatening texts sometimes followed a break-up, and in the aftermath of her relationship with Harvey, Karen went to the police.
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Both were told that because no money had been extracted, and there had been no physical abuse, the police were powerless. Complaints were made to dating sites, including Guardian Soulmates and Smooch, and accounts deemed suspicious were blocked. Meanwhile Susan went to a private investigator, who confirmed that the name she'd been given matched no records and was certainly fake. Ali found out that there was no Sebastian Pritchard-Jones registered to teach.
Exhaustive Googling and an appeal on social media turned up the square-jawed man from the photographs seen by Claire, Karen, Susan and Danielle. The man in the images seen by Ali turned out to be a construction worker called Gary who lived in Hull. As with Craig, his photos had been taken from Facebook; Gary admitted to me, when I telephoned, that he'd never been very careful with his security settings.
I told him Ali had been so wrung out by her nine-month affair with Seb — Gary's face, stranger's voice — that she'd eventually relocated to Australia. I just feel really sorry for [Ali].
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It's hard for me to take in, it's been a shock, but I'm not the one who's had my heart broken. One advantage of there being so many victims, according to Claire, is that they were able to compare notes. Joanna received her condolence card from a Pembrokeshire postcode, and Karen had been given a family address there that turned out to be fake. They'd all heard talk of a nursing home where Seb or Harry, or Harvey's disabled best friend Philip lived — it was in the same part of Wales.
Joanna discovered that, though Seb, Harry and Harvey left no tangible traces on the internet, Philip really did exist. There was a Welsh newspaper article about him and his devotion to his local football club.
She found an address for Philip's nursing home. Digging on the internet, someone else found a suspicious account on the picture-storage site Photobucket. It was full of the purloined Facebook pictures of Craig, including the one of his mohawk in the bath.