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Back in 2020, my friend — let’s call him Liam — messaged the group chat. “It’s relentless,” he said, with a screenshot of a message from a woman reading “Still single?”
Liam wasn’t complaining about the exhaustion of being desired. This was the same person he’d screenshotted into our chat the week before, when she was using the line “How’s lockdown treating you?” — pretty tame small talk, given she’d begun their correspondence with an unsolicited nude.
My mate — who is a Labour staffer — was featured in reports earlier this month about the Westminster honeytrapper, where it was revealed that UK politicians and parliamentary staffers had been targeted in a phishing attack. The WhatsApper, who went by the name Charlie or Abi, pretended to know the person, and the exchanges would become sexual. The reports mainly focused on attempts between October 2023 and February this year, but the story has longer roots. I should know, given I messaged “Abi” while she was still going by “Abbie” in 2020.
I’ll say that this wasn’t an entirely unusual situation for Liam. The same group chat has attempted to decode a voicemail he received in which two women laughed down the phone while attempting to spit the odd word out. But there was something about these particular messages that clearly made them fake. “Just don’t get what the end game is,” Liam grumbled, and it was true, it did seem weird. The WhatsApper didn’t want money, they weren’t trying to draw out his details, they just wanted to flirt.
Although we agreed it could be a unique experience to date a bot, he proceeded to ignore her. But it seemed worth testing, given the inexplicability of it all. Which is why I added the honeytrapper’s number to my contacts. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked. (The answer to that question is: four years later, screenshots of my WhatsApps being sent to the police.)
I decided to blunder in with a case of mistaken identity. If Abbie was real, there would be some kind of human response — even if it was simply, “Sorry babe, wrong number.”
Hey, I typed, without the foresight that I might one day be reiterating my messages in a newspaper column.
Who’s this, Abbie replied one minute later.
Your sis, dumbass, I responded. (I plead in my defence that I was attempting to establish a familiar tone.)
What? She was having none of it. No you aren’t, she wrote. Who is this.
It took her three minutes to say she was blocking me, six for our back-and-forth to be over. I relayed my interaction to the chat. The speed with which she distrusted and blocked me seemed to indicate the defensiveness of someone whose phone was only for initiating exchanges.
But the story didn’t end there. Last year, she appeared back on Liam’s phone. It was a different number and her name was now spelt “Abi”. She knew the campaign trail that he had been on the day before — which he hadn’t shared publicly — cited old work of his, and used his name again. “Long time no speak,” she messaged. “Liam right?”
When he replied, unsure of her identity, she explained how they met, before demurring: “I’ll be offended but not surprised if you don’t remember me.”
The tone was human, the back-story legitimate, the facts right. She sounded sweet, shy, interested. We discussed it but my mate was adamant — it didn’t match any encounter. He stopped replying. But what if it had sounded familiar? Or if he had allowed himself to believe it did . . .
It’s easy to consider scams from a position of knowledge and wonder how anyone could fall for them. But isn’t communication fuelled by imagination? We read in tones, intentions, subtexts; when virtual, we also summon the sender’s voice or facial expressions. So much is conjured. It reminds me of a successful scam from last year: a text from an unknown number arrives — “Hi Mum” — before the sender explains that their phone is lost or broken and they need money. In the first half of 2023, victims lost more than £460,000. The scam tapped into an instinct: my child needs help, I must act quickly. Later, the victim might reflect and think: shouldn’t I have double-checked it was them? But these scams rely on instinctual responses, on the victim acting upon a fear or a want.
I’m glad my friend wasn’t fooled by the honeytrapper, that those messages were only group-chat fodder. For him, it’s merely a funny story. Back in 2020, his intuition kicked in — “Must be some guy on a laptop somewhere,” he speculated. But as to what that person wanted? Well, that’s the mystery we’re still unpicking in the group chat.
Rebecca Watson is the FT’s assistant arts and books editor. Her second novel ‘I Will Crash’ will be published by Faber in July
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