Today I will use an adjournment debate in the Commons to highlight the modern menace of “catfishing” on the internet.
This phenomenon involves someone taking over another person’s identity online, pretending to be them and using social media to trawl for unsuspecting victims.
A catfish uses information, including photographs and names, appropriated from other people’s social media accounts, to create fake profiles with which to lure people into relationships.
We need a new law to tackle this growing scourge, which is causing much unhappiness to many people.
The extent of catfishing was first brought to my attention by one of my constituents, Matt Peacock.
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Matt is a male model from Stockport. He has had his identity stolen online for the past four years by a catfish who has used Matt’s pictures on dating websites to create fake social media profiles to entice women.
Matt’s family have been put under terrible strain and his wife has been contacted on many occasions to be wrongly told that her husband was cheating on her, asking women for sexual photographs and videos.
Photographs of Matt’s nephews and nieces have also been used by the catfish who claimed they were his children in an attempt to appear “caring” to single mothers he was trying to seduce.
Moreover, the women whom the catfish contacted using the false profile were devastated that they had been deceived over a long period and at least one said she felt suicidal.
However, despite creating all this upset the police told Matt there was nothing they could do as no notifiable crime has been committed by the catfish. This was despite Matt obtaining a taped confession from the catfish.
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At the moment there is no specific law against stealing another person’s identity. That must change. We need a new law to make it crystal clear that if someone takes another person’s identity and poses as them online then they are committing an offence.
I have also been contacted by other victims of catfishing, including Anna Rowe, who started a petition Change.org in February 2017 calling for it to made illegal to create a fake online profile with the intention of using it to entice others into a sexual relationship.
So far she has collected 41,472 names.
Anna’s catfish created a fake online persona using Facebook accounts, emails, Skype, Snapchat and Instagram accounts to create a background story of a man divorced for 15 months and looking for a meaningful long term relationship.
Since publicising her case, Anna has been contacted by many other women who said they too had been deceived and left devastated by the same man.
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In a third case, I was contacted by a mother who was worried about the awful effect of being catfished for four months had had on her son. He was so upset by the emotional strain it put him under that he has made a video on YouTube to warn other young people of the dangers.
We must do something about this and although a change in the law is the most effective deterrent, social media giants and dating apps must also do more to protect people.
The government’s new digital charter and the green paper on internet safety is an opportunity to arrive at agreement with companies about how to make safer online sites.
It gives a chance for a real partnership between legislators and technology to be developed to protect users from aggressive and harmful predators and for subsequent legislation to outlaw catfishing.
Ann Coffey is Labour MP for Stockport