Innocent holiday snap let beast ruin my life – I lost my boyfriend & was cruelly humiliated but worst was still to come | The Sun
SCROLLING through screenshots of messages she had supposedly sent to her ex-boss, Abby Furness’ stomach heaved.
Alongside reams of flirtatious chats were intimate glamour modelling shots of her posing naked.
It was the latest episode in a cyberstalking nightmare that had already cost the Only Fans model and dancer her relationship with her boyfriend.
And Abby, 22, wasn't the only victim to have her life turned upside down as her online stalker would turn out to be one of the UK’s most prolific.
After evading justice for over a decade, 31-year-old Matthew Hardy, from Northwich, Cheshire, was finally caged for nine years in January for a campaign of terror which left some women so afraid they slept with weapons.
“It’s no exaggeration when I say my life will never be the same," says Abby.
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Holiday snap hell
Her ordeal began in 2019 after a dream month in Ibiza with her then-boyfriend.
Through his work as a photographer, the couple met an exclusive party crowd of Instagram influencers and reality TV stars.
Abby’s new friends invited her to join a boat party on a private yacht.
“It was a perfect day,” Abby says. “We were drinking prosecco, and jumping off the boat into clear, blue waters.
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“I really thought I’d be friends with these people forever.”
But instead, one group shot caught the eye of serial cyberstalker Hardy.
In his bedroom 1,000 miles away, the loner was trawling through Instagram in the hunt for his next victim – and he had found her.
Alarm bells
Weeks later Abby was back home in Brighton when her phone pinged with a Whatsapp message, supposedly from one of the girls she’d met in Ibiza, Jodie.
Abby explains: “She was asking things like, where had I got my bikini from and how long had I been with my boyfriend – but we’d talked about all this stuff on the boat, it didn’t make sense.
“She told me she must have forgotten because she was having such a good time and at first I thought, ‘OK fair enough’.
“Then she asked, ‘Can I tell you a secret?’ and began telling me how she knew I’d got with one of the other girl’s boyfriends while we were all hanging out in Ibiza.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, it was a complete lie.
“I called the girl and explained I’d had these messages, and said I wanted to reassure her they weren’t true.
“She was cool about it and told me to just ignore them. She said they were always getting strange messages from people who wanted to mess with their lives.
“She knew there was no truth in it, so I just put it down to some weirdo.”
But Hardy didn’t stop there.
Over the following months, he harvested names from Abby’s social media profile to target work colleagues, friends and relatives, often using WhatsApp and posing as her.
And – messaging from another fake Instagram profile – he sabotaged Abby’s relationship with her boyfriend by telling him she was cheating.
“Things got really weird,” says Abby, who also performs as a fire-breathing dancer in nightspots and runs her own booking agency.
“We were living together at the time, but this created a huge barrier between us and we ended up splitting up over it.
“At this stage I still had no idea who was doing this to me, or why – all I knew was that whoever it was they were ruining my life.”
Sick nude pics plot
Messaging friends and relatives under pseudonyms, Hardy spread rumours that Abby was having a fling with her own uncle.
“I explained to my family it was a stalker and that they’d been tormenting me for ages,” Abby says. “No one really believed any of these lies, but they just didn’t want the drama.
“One family member even said I’d brought it all on myself, that I attract these people by posting intimate pictures on Instagram – but this is how I make my living.
“To this day, they've blocked me on every social media platform.”
Abby’s lowest point came in the summer of 2020 when her old boss contacted her out of the blue with a horrifying revelation.
“I’d worked for this guy as a dancer in some of his venues in Ayia Napa, but I hadn’t heard from him for about a year,” Abby explains.
“He messaged me on Facebook saying he was really sorry and that he felt a bit embarrassed.
“He said he’d been chatting with ‘me’ on WhatsApp – but now he wasn’t really sure if it was actually me.
“He sent me some screenshots of the conversation he’d been having, warning they were a bit inappropriate, and they just completely broke me.
“As well as a load of flirty chat there were nude photos of me. It was so gross and creepy. I felt sick. I’d never flirt with my boss, let alone send him nude photos.”
Abby discovered her stalker had cloned her profile and used it to message a professional photographer she’d booked for a glamour shoot.
The fake Abby claimed to have lost the link to a shared online folder containing the risque images – and the hapless snapper gladly handed it over.
“Fake Abby crossed a boundary I’d never have crossed,” she says. “Even though I knew it wasn’t me, somehow I still felt like I was to blame. I was being manipulated.”
Chilling second stalker
Around the same time, in a grim coincidence, a second stalker set his sights on Abby, knocking on the door of her parents’ home in Kent on her birthday.
Obsessed Jamie Spears turned up clutching a bottle of bubbly and asked for a hug and a selfie.
Baffled Abby assumed the mystery visitor was an old school and reluctantly agreed.
But she later realised the birthday card he’d left her was signed ‘JP Master’, the online name of one of her Only Fans subscribers.
Spears ignored Abby’s messages to never contact her again and instead stalked her around shops and on the beach back in Brighton.
“He followed all my friends on social media, he messaged me constantly, and he turned up at clubs I was working in where he’d stand in the crowd just staring at me,” says Abby.
“He’d get very close to me and told me he loved me, that he wanted me to live with him. He was so odd. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
In late June 2020, Abby and a pal were staying the night at her parents’ house.
As the pair packed their bags for another Ibiza jaunt, Abby’s phone pinged with a chilling message: 'You better not go to Ibiza. I’m going to come and get you. Beware.'
“It was from a fake photographer account on Instagram,” Abby remembers.
“This was my online stalker. I knew Jamie Spears wasn’t behind it because his patterns of speech were completely different.
“I was terrified. Was this person watching the house? The flight was leaving in four hours – were they going to be at the airport? Would they follow me to Ibiza?”
Horrified, Abby called the police.
“An officer rang me back, said he was half an hour’s drive away and asked me to read the messages.
“His attitude was, ‘Do you really think you’re in danger?’ I was just made to feel silly and small.
“My mum had warned me that if I ever tried to go to the police, they’d think I was just a silly little blonde girl – and she was right.”
Then, two days after she arrived in Ibiza, Spears messaged Abby to tell her he was also on the party island.
She went for drinks with friends to take her mind off the horror – but spotted Spears outside a bar staring at her through the window.
He followed the group to their holiday home then later fled the island after being confronted by Abby’s pals.
Serial stalker
Abby spent three months in Spain’s party capital constantly looking over her shoulder.
“By that point, I was thinking it was never going to stop,” she says. “I had this mystery stalker invading my online space, and Jamie Spears in person.
“My head was spinning. I felt like I was going insane.”
One Friday evening, as Abby spoke to her Instagram followers in a live feed, her online stalker’s mask slipped.
A name popped up in the comments: Matthew Hardy.
Later, she found a message request from Hardy himself waiting for her on Facebook.
“His message read, ‘It was all me’,” she says. “As soon as I tried to message him back, his account vanished – he blocked me.”
Back in the UK, as Abby embarked on her 3rd year studying performing arts at university, her ordeal continued.
Spears discovered the house she shared with uni friends and was spotted peeking through her bedroom window.
He followed her around town, hid behind bushes and parked cars, and wore hats and bizarre disguises in a bid to conceal himself.
After Spears was discovered lurking in her garden shed in February 2021 he was slapped with a Stalking Prevention Order.
But after breaching it twice the 37-year-old was jailed for 14 months in October last year.
How you can get help
Women’s Aid has this advice for victims and their families:
- Always keep your phone nearby.
- Get in touch with charities for help, including the Women’s Aid live chat helpline and services such as SupportLine.
- If you are in danger, call 999.
- Familiarise yourself with the Silent Solution, reporting abuse without speaking down the phone, instead dialing “55”.
- Always keep some money on you, including change for a pay phone or bus fare.
- If you suspect your partner is about to attack you, try to go to a lower-risk area of the house – for example, where there is a way out and access to a telephone.
- Avoid the kitchen and garage, where there are likely to be knives or other weapons. Avoid rooms where you might become trapped, such as the bathroom, or where you might be shut into a cupboard or other small space.
If you are a victim of domestic abuse, SupportLine is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6pm to 8pm on 01708 765200. The charity’s email support service is open weekdays and weekends during the crisis – [email protected].
Women’s Aid provides a live chat service – available weekdays from 8am-6pm and weekends 10am-6pm.
You can also call the freephone 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.
In the meantime, Hardy continued his onslaught via the internet.
Abby was receiving support from stalking advice service Veritas Justice over the Spears case and confided in them about her online ordeal.
Support workers encouraged her to give a statement to Sussex Police.
They passed the case on to colleagues in Cheshire, who already had a bulging file on Hardy stretching back 11 years.
“I spoke to the investigating officer, and he already knew my name,” Abby explains. “He even knew exactly when Hardy had started stalking me – they’d recovered loads of evidence from his devices.”
In fact, Hardy had been arrested 10 times on suspicion of stalking-related offences.
Dozens of victims – over 60 terrified women – had filed complaints with the police.
Yet somehow Hardy had evaded prosecution – until January this year.
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust reports that the number of stalking incidents from 2019-2020 was 1.5million, with a conviction rate of just 0.1 per cent.
Hardy appeared at Chester Crown Court and pleaded guilty to three counts of stalking with intent to cause alarm or distress, two counts of stalking without intent to cause alarm, and breaching a restraining order from 2013, which had banned him from using false details on social networking sites.
He also admitted stalking a further four women, which were taken into consideration on sentencing.
Hardy – who is autistic and has Asperger’s Syndrome – was jailed for nine years, thought to be the longest prison sentence dished out for stalking in the UK.
But last week he had his sentence reduced by a year on appeal.
And in a bitter twist of fate, Spears was released from prison just a few days later.
Although Hardy is locked away, for Abby the nightmare continues.
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“This has ruined my mental health,” she says. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder. I feel like my heart and brain have been shattered.
“That summer of 2019 in Ibiza was the last time that I ever felt truly carefree – and right now I don’t think I’ll ever have that again. Hardy’s taken that away from me.”
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