Complaint Review: Karen Faye Pratt

I've just found 4 reports on this site about a woman who also lied to me after we made contact through okcupid.com.  I'm adding my own, far less dramatic story for the sake of assembling a complete narrative on this site, although my story does not involve any criminal behavior, so far as I can tell.  Apart from that, many of the details from the other reports about this woman match the details of my own experience with her.

As in the other cases, this woman claimed to be named Karen Faye Pratt.  As I learned after about 3 weeks of corresponding with her, she passed off as photos of herself a number of fake photos of a model named Sarah Ziff, mostly taken from Ziff's instagram account.  Karen claimed to be living in San Diego, and to be working for Doughty Street Chambers, a London-based legal firm specializing in human rights.  She claimed to have been born in Paris, and to have grown up in Hampstead Village in London.  She said that she graduated from Harvard with a degree in Sanskrit literature, that she had worked for a hedge fund after college, followed by a year interning at LVMH (Louis Vuitton Hennesy Moet) where she was involved in fashion, followed by her work with Doughty Street Chambers.  

I sent Karen a very brief message on okcupid after I saw she'd visited my profile page.  She replied, then I replied, and things s****.>

At this point I sent her an e-mail saying I'd had a family emergency and needed to talk to me on the phone.  She sent me an instant message hours later warning me that she'd been diagnosed with vocal chord disorder, and that her voice was weak and difficult to understand.  When we got on the phone, her accent sounded real (although I'm no expert), and her voice was indeed very quiet - I could barely understand her.  We spoke for over 2 hours that night, and another 2 by instant message the next day.  

She told me that yes, she had lied to me.  That she never intended for things to get this far, but that she'd fallen in love with me and didn't know how to tell me the truth.  She said she was quite relieved that I'd found out, that she'd never done this before, and that everything else she'd told me about herself was true (this was also a lie).  She even sent me what she said were real pictures of her - another blond, fairly attractive young woman.  Strangely we talked a lot about my dating life, and I now think this might have been an attempt to gain some kind of leverage over me.  We also talked about the fact that I might be writing an article about online dating for a magazine, and about how this story would provide good material for it (very strange that she entertained this thought fairly cheerfully along with me, given that she seems to have been a practiced cyber criminal).  She pleaded with me to allow her to keep writing to me to express her admiration - whatever that would mean - and although I did feel conflicted about it, I told her that this was out of the question.  She seemed to take this gracefully enough, and she stopped writing me further.

As I mentioned, I have no indication that Karen did anything criminal with respect to me over the course of our correspondence.  Although having read the other reports, it seems as if things probably just didn't go on long enough for her to solicit any compromising information or material.  I was very disheartened by the experience and rather humiliated, but that was all.  

I hope that this report is of some help to Karen's victims, past and future.  She seems to be a dangerous person, and I now feel very lucky to have gotten away so lightly.