- Emma Perrier met who she thought was a 34-year-old electrician named Ronnie Scicluna on a dating app.
- They talked for months, but it turns out he was a 53-year-old retail store decorator who invented "Ronnie" by Googling a model's photos.
- When she found out, Perrier reached out to the model, Adem Guzel, to let him know that someone was using his photos.
- Perrier and Guzel started talking more, and now they're in love.
Catfishing stories don't usually come with happy endings. Emma Perrier and Adem Guzel's love story is a happy exception.
The whole saga, as chronicled in The Atlantic, is pretty incredible.
After a painful breakup, 33-year-old Perrier, who was working at a coffee shop in London, downloaded a dating app called Zoosk. A man named Ronaldo "Ronnie" Scicluna sent her a message saying "You look beautiful."
"Ronnie" was a persona created by 53-year-old retail store decorator Alan Stanley, who used photos of a male model to build the profile. He told The Atlantic that he'd done so at least five other times with other women.
Perrier and Stanley talked on the phone and texted for months, but he made excuses about being busy to avoid video calling or in-person dates.
As she grew more suspicious, she decided to use an app called Reverse Image Search to screen photos from his profile. Immediately, she found a model named Adam Guzel. When she confronted "Ronnie," he confessed everything. She had been catfished, tricked into falling for someone online who didn't exist in real life, and she was heartbroken.
Perrier sent Guzel a Facebook message to let him know that someone was using photos of him to catfish people on dating apps, and something about the message made him want to reply. So he did.
“And the conversation just started,” he told The Atlantic.
They talked for a while, then lost touch when he visited the small Turkish village where he grew up, but then reconnected. On April Fool's Day of 2016, he arrived in London's Heathrow Airport to visit her. They explored the city together, and it felt like they'd known each other for a long time.
They've now been living together for six months.
"My catfish became cupid, and now we're living happily ever after," Perrier told The Daily Mirror.
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