The exception that proves the rule.

Today I read the story of a woman who was catfished that ended with her and the person whose photos were stolen falling in love.  All very sweet you may think, but it causes a big problem for us.  People will see this and think the same can happen to them.  Let me make this clear – what happened is an anomaly, but it’s going to give false hope to people.  We’ve seen the flip side of this.  We’ve seen it when people have stalked the person whose photos were abused convinced they’d fall in love with them if only they had the chance to meet them, when they had to move due to the amount of grief and abuse they were getting from people, when a person couldn’t see the difference between the scammer and the person in the photos and attempted to kill her, when the photos were of a soldier who had been killed in action and their family had to deal with this further distress.  But hey, one story makes the media because it has a happy ending.  Let’s ignore the hundreds of thousands of times when all that happened was misery, bankruptcy and even death.  Things have just gotten a whole lot tougher for us, for the victims of scams and for the people who through no fault of their own are dragged into the scam through their stolen images.