A Catfishing With a Happy Ending
Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.
She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.
It was a customer who had caused Emma’s heartache, two months earlier. Connor was one of London’s dashing “city boys,” and 11 years her junior. He had telephoned her at work to ask her on a date, which turned into an eight-month romance. They went night-fishing for carp near his parents’ home in Kent, where they sat holding hands in the darkness, their lines dangling in the water. One day at the train station, Connor told her it wasn’t working; he liked nightclubs more than he liked being in a relationship. When she protested, Connor said that he’d never loved her.
To raise her spirits, Emma huffed and puffed her way through a high-energy barbell class called Bodypump, four times a week. Though she now felt prepared to join the 91 million people worldwide who use dating apps, deep down she did not believe that computers were an instrument of fate. “I’m a romantic,” Emma told me, two years after the internet turned her life upside down. “I love to love,” she said, in a thick French accent. “And I want to be loved too.”
As soon as her dating profile went live, Emma’s phone started to bleep and whistle with interest from strangers. The app allowed her to gaze at a vast assortment of suitors like cakes in a coffee-shop window, but not interact with them until she subscribed. That evening, a private message arrived in her inbox. It was from a dark-haired Italian named Ronaldo “Ronnie” Scicluna, who looked to Emma like a high-school crush. But the text was “floue,” Emma told me, not knowing the English word for “blurred.” The app was holding Ronnie’s message ransom.
That night, Emma FaceTimed her sister and showed her Ronnie’s photos: “Oh my God, look at the guy!” she giggled, as they swiped through his profile pictures. He was boyish yet mysterious, like the kind of dangersome male model who steers sailboats through cologne commercials. But according to his profile, Ronnie
