Notorious catfisher who focused as much as 100 ladies ultimately unmasked by victims as a lady

Adele Rennie is currently in jail for the fourth time after a 15-year campaign of cyber stalking multiple victims and pretending to be a man called ‘Dr David Graham’

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A notorious catfisher who targeted up to 100 women online posing as a male doctor was eventually unmasked by his victims as a woman called Adele Rennie – after they came to together to form a 007 sleuth group.

Rennie posed as ‘Dr David Graham’ and bombarded a number of women with messages and phone calls using a voice changing app in such an appealing manner that some of her victims admitted they fell in love with her online persona.

Her victims eventually became suspicious of Dr Graham after he repeatedly avoided meeting them in person – and eventually revealed him to be Rennie.

Rennie was jailed for a fourth time in April last year after messaging a victim she had been banned from contacting for five years just 11 days after being released from prison.

She was jailed in September 2024 to two years and four months after pleading guilty to four charges including stalking and had been jailed for similar crimes in 2017 and 2019.

Now six of the women who were targeted by Rennie, 35, over the course of 15 years have opened up in a BBC documentary about the catfisher – who has still refused to reveal why she did what she did.

Former Miss Scotland finalist Abbie Draper, now 35, from Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, spoke about how her investigation was a “race against time” and she “just had to screenshot everything, write things down, the more evidence the better”.

Ms Draper said: “When I started looking deeper into David Graham’s Facebook, then I started noticing it was all the same people commenting on his things. Then I started asking myself, well, are they real?

“We would reverse image search so you can put an image into Google and find out where it’s come through. We found these profiles had actually been stolen from Instagram.

“There was a web of people – so you’ve got David here, and then you’ve got all these profiles validating that David is a real person. We screenshotted the other profiles as well.

“Time went so fast, and I didn’t sleep. I was sitting on my phone looking for things and my laptop. Before I knew it we were onto like 5, 6 in the morning – and then I’d have a quick sleep and then I’ll wake back up again. I was consumed by it all.”

Speaking about how she first met ‘Dr Graham’ in 2014, Ms Draper said she was contacted after her grandfather landed in Crosshouse hospital with a stroke. He claimed to be her grandfather’s doctor, but she eventually smelled a rat and found other women who had also been befriended by the man.

They formed an online group called 007 and discovered he was actually Rennie – the nurse who had been looking after Ms Draper’s grandfather in hospital.

She called it “sickening” and told the documentary: “It’s a very vulnerable ward. If you really wanted to take an advantage of people that would be the ward to be in.”

Cyber security expert Rory Innes told the documentary: “When I first heard of the Adele Rennie case, I think the most surprising element is how long it went on for.”

Mr Innes added that as victims are forced to investigate their own cases the risks for them get ‘higher and higher’ and later asked: “If your perpetrator doesn’t go to prison then how safe do you feel?”

Rennie’s mother Christine also appears in the documentary and revealed she’s been through ‘every emotion’.

She said: “It’s just such a horrible feeling.

“You can’t just believe that your daughter has gone to one of them vans and taken off to a prison. She’s in sex offenders register. It’s so complex it’s very hard to make any sense of it.

“I was mortified. Ashamed. I went through every emotion.”

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