A 28-year-old British man who flew to America to meet his chatroom "love" got more than he bargained for when the woman, who he thought was 30, turned out to be a 68-year-old.
Wynema Faye Shumate, from South Carolina, conned Trevor Tasker into the trans-atlantic tryst by sending him a semi-nude picture of her taken 30 years ago.
Thinking things couldn't get any worse, Tasker went back to the pensioner's flat to discover a corpse in her freezer. The body has been identified as that of Jim O'Neil, Shumate's flat mate.
O'Neil died of natural causes, but Shumate had kept him in the deep freeze for a year so she could live in his house and spend his money. According to reports Shumate had to chop off one of O'Neil's legs to fit him in the freezer.
Shumate has been jailed for a year, after pleading guilty to fraud and unlawful removal of a dead body. Tasker is back home in Selby, North Yorkshire, with his mother.
Tasker reportedly said of Shumate: "When I saw her picture I thought 'Wow.' But when she met me at the airport I almost had a heart attack."
Vowing never to return to the Internet, Tasker said: "I'll never log on again."
The Internet may make "virtual reality" part of everyday life, but it is obvious that is already has made "virtual unreality" commonplace. Imagine if all we had to go on to make decisions about elections was information made available over the Net. We could never separate fact from fiction. Well, er....
Sorry, people are already making decisions based on unsupported information available on the Net, and we already had trouble separating fact from fiction before the Net became popular. I wirhdraw my comment.