A flight attendant and an Aussie heart-throb fall in love – or so it looked from the outside before it all unravelled and was exposed as Australia’s worst ever catfishing story.
In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, flight attendant Jess shared how she met Aussie actor Lincoln Lewis 14 years ago while she was living her dream job.
That chance encounter with the star quickly turned into a decades-long nightmare for the single mum, as she was catfished by someone who pretended to be Mr Lewis.
“People will never understand, and they’ll always think ‘how can you be so stupid?’,” Jess told 60 Minutes.
“But until you’re in it, you won’t understand how difficult it is to get out of it.”
Jess was one of five women who was stalked by Lydia Abdelmalek over the course of around four years through a variety of fake online personas she created.
Mr Lewis was one of those false identities, along with British soap star Danny Mac.
Abdelmalek, 33, harassed her victims and their families and used the private details she obtained to blackmail them.
It eventually led to a woman, known as Emma, taking her own life in 2018.
After her chance meeting with Mr Lewis, Jess had added an account which she thought was the real Mr Lewis on Facebook and the pair quickly sparked an online friendship through regular messaging.
What Jess didn’t know was she was actually messaging Abdelmalek.
“This person had a very cunning way of extracting information,” Jess said.
“I still remember the actual day that it all changed (in 2013).
“I recall him saying, ‘can I call you?’. I thought, ‘Wow. Okay, why not?’.
“So I gave him my number.
“You know, when a nice young man starts paying you compliments and knows, seems to know a lot about you, it’s very flattering.”
The catfish and Jess began a long-distance relationship conducted entirely online and despite never managing to meet in person the couple communicated exclusively in telephone calls and text messages.
Jess said the person she was in a relationship with always had “excuses” for why they couldn’t meet up in person.
“I started to have a few little doubts. The fact that he wouldn’t meet me and, and stuff,” she said.
“I started to have niggling doubts but I thought why would anyone contact me and, you know, want to lie to me?”
It got to the stage Jess wanted further proof other than the happy snaps ‘Lincoln’ had sent her, so they had a Skype call.
“The phone rang and sure enough, here is Lincoln Lewis talking to me,” Jess said.
“And I just remember seeing him talking. I would say something and there’d be a bit of a delay and then a few minutes later you would see him, like, kind of laughing and throwing his head back … I was giddy. I was excited.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is actually him talking to me’.”
Abdelmalek had managed to trick Jess into thinking she was speaking with Lincoln Lewis by using software that can take video footage of a person and turn it into a real life scenario.
But the twisted saga got more confusing when Jess got a call from a colleague who told her Mr Lewis had flown to Brisbane on her flight, despite him telling Jess he was in Sydney.
“I’ve never known someone who can lie so brilliantly,” Jess said after she’d spoken to fake Lincoln Lewis.
“The time that they were in the air – where he wouldn’t have been able to have contacted me – was the time that I had been talking to him all morning.
“And I then confronted him and said ‘You need to tell me who you are’.”
Jess decided to find out the truth and managed to get in contact with the real Lincoln Lewis only to have her heart broken.
“He said, ‘Jess, I‘m sorry. I’m sorry that this has happened to you but it’s not me’. He said, ‘it’s never been me’,” Jess recalled.
“It’s not a person. It’s a disgusting, subhuman creature. No one that’s human could do that to another person. Could be so vindictive and so evil … it’s disgusting.”
But the nightmare was only just beginning.
When Jess tried to end her relationship with the catfish posing as the Home And Away actor, she was forced to change her mobile phone number.
She said within 10 minutes of her changing her number, Abdelmalek contacted Optus to get Jess’s new number and began stalking the single mum.
Jess was forced to move house twice and changed her daughter’s school but the calls kept coming.
“I remember one night, I was in the foetal position on my bed. I’d had 50, 60 messages in a row with threats about my daughter,” Jess said.
“My phone just kept ringing. And I just had the pillow over my head. I was like, ‘just make it stop’.”
Jess contacted police to help her stop Abdelmalek, who she still believed was a man.
She offered to collect evidence for the police investigation by secretly recording more of her calls with the catfisher.
Eventually Jess spun her own ruse to get Abdelmalek to deposit money into her bank account to pay for a new phone, and police were able to make their arrest.
But the most shocking part was the discovery that Jess’s supposed boyfriend had been a woman masquerading as a man for their whole relationship.
“For so, for so long, the person that I spoke with, in my mind, 1000 per cent was a man,” Jess said.
“It was a male.
“Yeah, it’s hard to convey how I felt at the time … I wanted to vomit.
“To have that thing staring back at me with this voice, it just made me feel sick to my stomach. It was horrendous.”
Jess later learnt her friend ‘Emma’ was also one of Abdelmalek’s victims. Sadly, Emma took her own life before Abdelmalek’s trial could begin.
The catfisher was found guilty of six counts of stalking and initially sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.
“So we were elated, we were so happy, we were, you know, in tears crying,” Jess said.
“We’d finally stopped it. Because these people won’t stop what they’re doing.
“They have to be stopped, so that’s what we did.”
Abdelmalek appealed the ruling in the Victorian County Court in October, but Judge Claire Quin upheld the guilty verdict and increased her sentence to four years in jail.
Judge Quinn said while the case sounded like something straight out of a television show, it had “significant consequences” for the victims.
Former Australian Federal Police fraud investigator, Tam McLaughlin, told 60 Minutes that catfishing crimes can be increasingly difficult for police to identify and prosecute.
“In this case, as we saw, the main difficulty is identifying who the actual perpetrator is, and that took years and years of diligent detective work to prove in this case,” Mr McLaughlin said.
“We all know what a blood spatter pattern looks like, or we all know what fingerprints on a stolen vehicle look like, but do we all know what the list of IP addresses that might match to a particular iPad or the, what the IME, so the hardware number that attaches to a phone is?
“And so it’s about having the education within the investigators of those particular technical aspects, you have to undertake the investigation in such a meticulous way as to make sure that you close all of the gates for someone to say, ‘No, that wasn’t me. That was someone else’.”
Jess said she still remains heartbroken by the horrifying experience but she’s relieved to finally see justice has been achieved.
“On the day that it was taken to jail, I felt very strong, I felt very brave and I felt proud because this is something that Emma and I had spoken about, we wanna see this person punished for what they did,” she said.
“Even though I know it’s not my fault, I still can’t help feeling to blame for it happening. So I don’t trust myself with any future relationships or anything like that.”
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