‘I was catfished’: Casey Donovan opens up about her dating scam nightmare

Casey Donovan was just 16 when she was catfished into having an imaginary relationship with a man who didn’t exist. In this week’s Crime Night! the singer opens up about her six-year ordeal. 

She was on top of the world, having just won Australian Idol, when she received a phone call from a guy who said his name was Campbell.

“It was exciting,” Casey, now 38, says on the show, which focuses this week on romance scams. “I was a weird, awkward, grungy-looking teenager who had just won a national contest. No guys were interested in me.”

She was on tour at the time and couldn’t go out drinking because she was under age – and so Campbell became her new “best friend” to chat to.

“It was something that was giving me confidence and I felt lovely,” Casey recalls.

And then, weirdly, whenever she went out to meet Campbell, a girl called Olga would show up instead. So, Casey and Olga became pals. So close, they were like “sisters”.

When Campbell said it would be “cute” if Casey and Olga “hooked up”, she acquiesced – she thought if she did this “he would show up”. He never did.

Eventually, Casey began to piece together that her online boyfriend and Olga were the same person. “That’s when I started finding the… lies and the deceit of it all,” Casey says. She spoke to people who Campbell said he knew but they had no idea who he was.

Casey and her manager confronted Olga, telling her she needed to speak up and tell the truth. But she “sat in the car silent”.

The singer also discusses the ordeal in her 2014 autobiography, Big, Beautiful & Sexy.

Since releasing her memoir, Casey says she has had 12 other women come forward to tell her they were manipulated by the same person.

As Professor Danielle Reynald says in the episode: “Anyone can be scammed.”

“Casey was extremely generous to come and discuss it with us,” host Julia Zemiro tells TV WEEK. “What we really try to say in the episode is that romance scams don’t happen to silly people. They happen to anyone who has a heart and wants to connect. 

“I think it’s dangerous to morally judge people, because we’re all lonely at some point in our life.”

We also learn about Donna Nelson, an Australian grandmother sentenced to six years in jail by a Japanese court in 2024 after being, allegedly, tricked by a scammer into carrying drugs into Japan.

Donna had struck up an online relationship with a man named Kelly during the COVID lockdowns. After daily video calls, Donna decided to fly to Japan to be with Kelly. He’d arranged for a layover in Laos, and while there asked her to bring a sample suitcase with fabrics.

But what she didn’t know was that drugs were allegedly hidden inside the suitcase and Donna had become an unwitting drug mule.

Crime Night! airs Wednesday, 9pm on ABC and iview.