A Brit who was catfished in the middle of the Australian outback was stunned when he found out who his dating app match turned out to be.
Resort worker Olly Lewis revealed how dating in the Northern Territory took a bizarre turn when a match he had been chatting to for weeks turned out to be a much older colleague.
The catfish had stolen the identity of someone in the town where Olly was staying – and sent him on a bizarre wild goose chase.
The 26-year-old, from Herefordshire, travelled to Australia on a working holiday visa 18 months ago – where he was duped by a potential hook-up.
“I thought catfishing was just something that happened on scripted reality TV shows. But no. It happened to me,” he told The Sun.
Olly had gone to work at the rural resort, where the nearest town of Alice Springs was “roughly a six-hour drive away”.
In the ultra-small community, he decided to download a dating app to explore his romantic options.
“There are about 30 of us young people working here,” Olly said.
“So there’s not a lot of us, but when you meet other travellers you form closer bonds.”
Olly’s app told him there were only four other guys in his area – and then he received a message from someone with a blank profile.
Before long, the man had sent him a photo of himself – and Olly recognised him “straight away” as someone he’d seen in the gym.
Olly began to refer to him as the “Handsome Discreet Gym Boy”.
And after agreeing to meet up after messaging, Olly went out to the Residents Club for some drinks with friends and heard nothing from his match.
After a week, the pair were messaging each other “semi-regularly”.
But once his match started opening up more, things became a “little unhinged”.
The potential date told Olly he didn’t want him messaging other people and started mentioning marriage – even asking to size him up for a wedding ring.
Olly admitted he “didn’t have much entertainment” in the desert, so despite the “bizarre” messages, he decided to stick it out.
Shortly after, Olly found himself out with friends again at local pub, where he saw “Handsome Discreet Gym Boy”.
But the bloke didn’t even look at him – leaving Olly baffled.
The same thing happened again at a party hosted by a mutual friend.
Olly realised he was being completely blanked by the man he’d supposedly been messaging for weeks.
When his match hosted his own party, Olly was determined to speak to him in person.
After hours of drinking and chatting, the Brit decided to approach the man who he thought he’d been speaking to on the dating app.
Olly said: “I’m like, ‘hey, do you want to hang out for a bit?’
“And he looks me dead in the eyes, says no, and slams the door in my face.”
When Olly then messaged him the next day asking why he didn’t want to hang out, he confusingly replied: “Sorry, I was working late.”
Olly decided his dating app contact was clearly “too shy” to ever take the leap and speak to him in real life.
Days later, while out for lunch in a cafe with friends, Olly spied him as he walked in and sat down three tables behind them.
Olly’s phone then bleeped with a message notification – the man was texting him.
But it suddenly dawned on him that the bloke’s phone was nowhere to be seen as he tucked into his lunch.
As he checked the dating app’s location services, it seemed the man he was messaging was actually 1km away – not sitting in the very same cafe.
And when a flummoxed Olly then messaged to ask where the guy was eating his lunch, the dating app deceiver said a different place altogether – confirming his suspicions.
Olly rushed to text the person he’d been messaging online who admitted he had lied before sending a photo of himself.
The snap, only designed to last a few seconds, shocked Olly.
It turned out the person he had been messaging was a colleague at the resort – not the gym buff in the photograph he had been sent originally.
“He was about 20 years older than it said in his profile,” Olly said.
“And he definitely is not the handsome, charming gym goer that I’ve been envisaging while having these conversations.”
Happy-go-lucky Olly admitted he has decided not to bring it up with his sneaky co-worker in person.
He said: “It was one of the most chaotic things to ever happen to me.
“And I discovered it had happened before, I wasn’t the only victim.
“I work with him, but I never confronted him properly. I felt like it would be too awkward.”
Olly said he felt safe and couldn’t be bothered to make an enemy in his remote surroundings.
And he added: “I felt like I fell for the catfishing so easily because it’s such a small community, I never thought someone would impersonate another person.”
Olly posts videos about his experiences abroad on his Tiktok, @ollytedlewis, and makes sure not to romanticise some of the misadventures involved in moving across the world.
And he insisted taking the plunge and moving Down Under was totally worth it – before laughing, “I don’t think anyone’s dying to come to Australia after my catfishing story.”
This story originally appeared on The Sun and reproduced with permission