A mother of two from Co Cork has opened up about her experience of getting catfished on a dating app.
Blogger Julie Haynes - who runs the popular Instagram account @twins_and_me_ - decided to give online dating a go after splitting up with the father of her children.
She was chatting to a man who claimed he was a builder from Clare - but all was not as it seemed.
She told RSVP Live: “There are some weirdos out there. I have heard some lovely stories about people meeting their boyfriends on Tinder or Bumble, and you can get lucky - but I haven’t been.
“So I was chatting to this lad and he was telling me his life story. He told me he was a builder, he had his own company and he had four or five lads working under him.
“He said he had moved to Cork from Clare because he wanted to expand his business in Cork.
“We were chatting away, I was thinking this guy really has a good head on his shoulders, and he was working in Douglas which is only about 20 minutes away from me.”
She said the guy was “always respectful” and never asked her for nudes or tried anything inappropriate.
Eventually he asked her out for coffee and she excitedly said yes.
“I asked my mum to babysit the kids, and I did my hair and my makeup.
“We were meant to meet at four o’clock so I texted him about 3 to ask what the story was as I hadn’t heard anything.
“He said ‘I’m so sorry, something huge has happened at work. A wall fell down, there’s drama.’
“Alarm bells started ringing for me then. I was like, why didn’t he text me earlier when the wall first fell down? Why did he wait until the last minute?”
Julie decided to do some digging to see if she could find out more about this guy.
“My dad had passed away and this guy had told me his own dad had also passed away and he told me his name, so I decided to do some research.
“I went on to RIP.ie and I looked him up, and I found him, a man who owned this big business in Limerick. It said he was mourned by his sons, and their names. So I went on to social media and looked up all the boys. But the guy that I was chatting to was not him at all!
“I called him out on it and he blocked me straight away!”
Julie put up a picture of the man’s profile on her Instagram to warn other girls about him - and was surprised by the response.
“Five other girls came forward and sent me screenshots and it was the same guy.
“Another girl had found the real guy’s page and she sent me the link. He’s over in Newcastle. The catfish guy had screenshotted one of his Facebook pictures, and his work crest was on his t-shirt. So she Googled the workplace and found the guy!
“I went on to his Instagram page, he seems like a lovely, normal guy. He got engaged on New Year’s Eve in New York!”
Reflecting on what the person who was catfishing her wanted, she said: “He just wanted to chat, which was bizarre. I don’t know if it was a girl behind the page, or just a lonely man.”
