Catfisher conned flight attendant Jess into believing she was in romance with TV star Lincoln Lewis

A flight attendant and a heartbroken Aussie fall in love – or so it seemed from the outside before it all unraveled and was exposed as Australia’s worst catfishing story ever.

In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, flight attendant Jess shared how she met Aussie actor Lincoln Lewis 14 years ago while living her dream job.

That chance encounter with the star quickly turned into a decades-long nightmare for the single mother, when she was attacked by someone posing as 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 hard it is to get out.”

Jess was one of five women stalked by Lydia Abdelmalek over the course of about 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 information she obtained to blackmail them.

It eventually led to a woman known as Emma committing suicide in 2018.

After her chance encounter with Mr. Lewis, Jess had added an account she thought was the real Mr. Lewis on Facebook and the pair soon sparked an online friendship through regular messages.

What Jess didn’t know was that she was texting Abdelmalek.

“This person had a very cunning way of extracting information,” Jess said.

“I still remember the day it all changed (in 2013).

“I remember him saying, ‘Can I call you?’ I thought, ‘Wow. OK why not?’.

So I gave him my number.

“You know, when a nice young man starts complimenting you and knows a lot about you, seems to know, that’s very flattering.”

The Catfish and Jess began a long-distance relationship that was conducted entirely online and despite never meeting in person, the pair communicated exclusively in phone calls and text messages.

Jess said the person she dated always had “excuses” why they couldn’t meet in person.

‘I started to have some doubts. The fact that he wouldn’t meet me and everything,’ she said.

“I started to have nagging doubts, but I thought, Why would someone contact me and want to lie to me?”

It got to the point where Jess wanted more proof than the happy snaps “Lincoln” had sent her, so they had a Skype call.

“The phone rang and sure enough, here’s Lincoln Lewis talking to me,” Jess said.

“And I only remember seeing him talk. I’d say something and there’d be a little delay and then a few minutes later you’d see him, like, kind of laugh and throw his head back… I was dizzy. 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 talking to Lincoln Lewis by using software that can take video footage of a person and turn it into a realistic scenario.

But the twisted saga became more confusing when Jess received a call from a colleague who told her that Mr. Lewis had flown to Brisbane on her flight, despite telling Jess he was in Sydney.

“I’ve never known anyone who can lie so brilliantly,” Jess said after talking to fake Lincoln Lewis.

“The time they’d been on the air—where he couldn’t have contacted me—was the time I’d been up all morning talking to him.

“And then I confronted him and said, ‘You have to tell me who you are.'”

Jess decided to find out the truth and managed to get in touch with the real Lincoln Lewis, but her heart broke.

He said, ‘Jess, I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you, but it’s not me.” He said, ‘It never was me,'” Jess recalled.

‘It’s not a person. It is a disgusting, inhuman creature. No one who is human can do that to another person. It can be so vengeful and so evil… it’s disgusting.”

But the nightmare had only just begun.

When Jess tried to end her relationship with the catfish posing as the Home And Away actor, she had to change her cell phone number.

She said that within 10 minutes of changing her number, Abdelmalek contacted Optus to get Jess’s new number and began stalking the single mother.

Jess had to move twice and change schools for her daughter, but the calls kept coming.

“I remember one night when I was lying on my bed in a fetal position. I had 50, 60 messages in a row with threats about my daughter,” Jess said.

My phone kept ringing. And I just had the pillow over my head. I was like ‘just make it stop’.”

Jess contacted the police to help her stop Abdelmalek, who she still thought was a man.

She volunteered to gather evidence for the police investigation by secretly recording more of her calls to the catfisher.

Eventually, Jess concocted her own ruse to get Abdelmalek to put money into her bank account to pay for a new phone, and the police were able to arrest them.

But most shocking was the discovery that Jess’s supposed boyfriend was a woman posing as a man throughout their relationship.

“For so long, the person I was talking to in my mind was 1,000 percent male,” Jess said.

‘It was a male.

‘Yes, it’s hard to convey how I felt then… I wanted to throw up.

“To have that thing staring at me in this voice, it just made me feel sick. It was horrible.’

Jess later learned that her friend ‘Emma’ was also one of Abdelmalek’s victims. Unfortunately, Emma killed herself before Abdelmalek’s trial could begin.

The catfish was found guilty of six counts of stalking and initially sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.

“So we were elated, we were so happy, we were, you know, crying in tears,” Jess said.

“We had finally stopped it. Because these people don’t stop what they’re doing.

“They need to be stopped, so we did.”

Abdelmalek appealed the ruling to Victorian County Court in October, but Judge Claire Quin upheld the conviction and increased her sentence to four years in prison.

Judge Quinn said that while the case sounded like something straight out of a television show, it had “significant implications” for the victims.

Former Australian Federal Police fraud investigator Tam McLaughlin told 60 Minutes that catfishing crimes are increasingly difficult for police to identify and prosecute.

“In this case, as we saw, the main difficulty is identifying who the real perpetrator is, and that took years and years of diligence detective work to prove in this case,” said Mr. McLaughlin.

“We all know what a pattern of blood spatter 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 match a particular iPad or the, what the IME, so it hardware number associated with a phone is?

“And so it’s about the researchers having the training of those specific technical aspects. You have to conduct the research in such a meticulous way that you make sure you close all the gates so that someone can say, ‘No, that was.’ not me. That was someone else’.’

Jess said she is still heartbroken from the horrific experience, but she is relieved that justice has finally been served.

“On the day 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 talked about, we want this person to be punished for what he did,” she said.

“Even though I know it’s not my fault, I can’t help but feel responsible for it. So I don’t trust myself with future relationships or anything like that.’