It's a cruel and unusual way to get revenge on an
ex: Matthew Herrick, a 32-year-old actor and model in New York City,
says that his former boyfriend set up a series of spoofed Grindr accounts
featuring Herrick's photos, phone number, and home and work locations,
then catfished other users of the app so that they
showed up at
Herrick's apartment and the restaurant where he works expecting to have
sex with him.
Herrick says that when the first of these visitors
appeared at his apartment last October, the man asked if Herrick was the
Grindr user who had just invited him over and showed Herrick a profile
featuring a photo of him lifted from his Instagram account. Herrick says
he reported the profile to Grindr but never received anything beyond an
auto-reply promising the company was looking into it. The spoofed
accounts have proliferated, allegedly stating that Herrick was looking
for rough sex including a "rape fantasy," orgies, and drugs. And since
that day in October, the visitors have poured in, with what he estimates
as over 700 men overall showing up to seek sex with him — some of them
getting physically aggressive, swearing at Herrick, and refusing to
leave. "My entire life has been stolen from me. My privacy has been
taken from me," he told Wired. "I’m humiliated daily. It’s a living hell."
Last
week, Herrick filed a lawsuit against Grindr in the Supreme Court of
New York over the company's "negligence, intentional infliction of
emotional distress, false advertising, and deceptive business
practices." The suit calls his ex the creator of the fake accounts but
doesn't name him as a defendant: in this case, Herrick is looking for
Grindr to take responsibility for failing to respond with anything
beyond an auto-reply any of the 50 times he says he's reached out to the
company. He's even reported the situation to the police, some of whom
he says have asked why he doesn't move or change jobs. "I find that so
insulting," he told Wired. “Why doesn’t Grindr do its job?”
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