Anna Rowe was duped for almost a year (Picture: SWNS)

A woman who was duped by a married man who used a picture of a famous Bollywood actor online is calling for ‘catfishing’ to be made illegal.

Anna Rowe, 44, was involved with a high-flying City lawyer she’d met on Tinder for almost a year – before discovering that his name was fake, he had a wife and children, and the photo he had initially used was of Saif Ali Khan.

The hoaxer, who went by the name ‘Antony Ray’, kept their relationship going by repeatedly asking the teaching assistant to marry him.

She claims he used her like a ‘personal hotel with benefits’, while making her think he was committed to a loving relationship.


Some of the messages Antony Ray sent Anna (Picture: SWNS)

Anna felt betrayed (Picture: SWNS)

Anna, from Rough Common in Kent, said: ‘He broke my trust, took away my right to choose. I did not consent to having a relationship with a married man, or a man who was actively having relations with multiple women simultaneously.’

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Although he’d used Khan’s photo, he eventually sent Anna real photos of himself and the two met up in person on November 3, 2015.



After that first meeting, he then visited her at home twice a week for six months, claiming that his work as a businessman required him to travel often to Germany and Ireland.

‘He walked into my house with a quiet confidence, calm and an ease that felt like he had done the same every night for years,’ Anna said.

‘It was like he was supposed to be there. He instinctively knew how to hold me. It was like I’d known him and him me for far longer than we had.’

‘Antony’s’ fake profile – which used a picture of Saif Ali Khan (Picture: SWNS)

But his visits suddenly became far less frequent. The two met on May 3, but then Anna didn’t see him for another five months.

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When the distance, lack of contact and unanswered calls became too much to bear, she re-downloaded Tinder and started chatting to Antony Ray, using a fake profile.

He immediately gave her the same spiel as before – that he wanted things to be ‘all or nothing from day one’ – until she finally let on who she was.

Soon afterwards she uncovered his real identity – a top legal executive who spent his working week in London, and his weekends at home with his family in the north of England.

Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan, whose photos were used for the fake profile (Picture: SWNS)

‘His alias was a clever twist on his real name,’ she said. ‘Then I sat and cried and cried. Worst of all was finding out he was married.

‘Everything that hadn’t added up over the months, all the red flags and bad gut feelings over things that I had felt and pushed aside because I trusted him more than I did myself, or he had given me a reasonable answer to a question or I’d told myself I was being paranoid.’

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After speaking publicly about her ordeal, Anna started a petition to force anyone with an online dating profile to use their real name.

‘I am a victim of a catfish approach. Using a fake profile and online identity as a platform to lure women or men for sex should be illegal, but it’s not,’ she said.

‘The result is the other party believing they are beginning a real relationship with the hope of a future together and having sex is part of that believed relationship.

‘Creating a fake online profile with the intent to use women or men for sex, should be a crime under the fraud act, communications act and sexual offences act.’