A man has revealed how he was catfished in a bitter act of revenge by his ex-girlfriend.

Online dating is quite similar to gambling – you never know what you’re getting yourself into…and one man, from the UK, had quite an unlucky experience.

With many people opting to use dating apps, places like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and even Instagram have become the places to seek love and romance.

It’s exactly the latter, Instagram, where 29-year-old Ray started talking to Helen, a blonde stunner who had slid into his DMs.

But after almost a year of chatting and even falling in love, the two had never met up – despite living relatively close to each other.

Trying to figure out what’s going on, Ray approached the MTV show, Catfish UK, which sees hosts, Oobah Butler and Nella Rose help people find out whether they’ve been catfished.

”We started chatting and really hit it off because she’s into a lot of the same things I am,” he explained.

”I’m 29 and thinking about settling down. Things with Helen have gone serious over the last year and we’ve started making plans for the future.”

Despite not having met once over the course of the last 12 months because the 25-year-old hairdresser always had an excuse, Ray said there was something special about her.

”We’re talking every single day,” he explained.

”She’s been able to access a part of me that I don’t share with a lot of people.

”She makes me feel good.”

Seeing how happy the 29-year-old, from Guildford, was and how much he wanted to finally meet the stunner he’d been talking to all this while, Oobah and Nella set off to work.

The two soon concluded that Ray was in love, which had made him ”forgive lots of things which don’t quite weigh up”.

Trying to solve the mystery, the duo began calling hairdressers around the area where Helen allegedly lived – but to no avail, as all of them claimed there was no Helen with that surname.

Another solution to try and put the pieces together was contacting a friend Helen had on Instagram.

But despite leaving a couple of voice notes, the person was not willing to give out any information about Helen.

It was then that they came up with a brilliant idea – to use reverse image search, which revealed where Helen’s photos on social media had really come from.

The stunning images belonged to a young woman living in Scotland.

After learning that Helen was, in fact, a catfish and had been using a fake persona all this time, Ray was upset.

”It makes me feel stupid,” he said. “It’s just embarrassing.”

However, things came to a shocking head when the team arranged to meet up with “Helen”.

The lovestruck lothario looked like he’d seen a ghost as a blonde woman came round the corner – and she clearly wasn’t the same person from the photos.

Ray exclaimed “oh my days” when he finally saw who he’d been texting all this time – his ex Aoife who he’d split up with a year ago.

Smiling, she said: “How does it feel Ray? You hurt me and now I hurt you.”

The bewildered hosts were confused and asked Aoife to explain the situation.

The woman said: “My name is not Helen, it is Aoife. We dated for a year, like a year ago.”

When asked why she had pretended to be Helen, Aoife said it was all for “revenge” and to “get him back” for him cheating on her.

She continued: “I found him talking to multiple girls, since the beginning. I felt terrible, it was the end of my world. I was in love with him, he was my first proper love.

“You wasted my time, a year for a year.

“I want him to hurt the same way I hurt, I wanted to embarrass him.”

Ray shed more light on their background: “We dated for eight months and it wasn’t something that I took seriously and I was obviously talking to other people.

“Clearly she got the wrong idea of what was going on.

“I never made it official though.

“I never remember telling you that I wanted you to be my girlfriend.”

Aoife disagreed and said: “He’d tell me he wanted to get married to me and he wanted kids with me.

“We did Valentine’s Day together, got me flowers, balloons with my names on them, a ring with a heart on it.”

Ray admitted he “may have led her on” and it “wasn’t that deep” for him.

Oobah and Nella Rose were shocked and said they were “both as messed up as each other.”

Nelly said: “At the end of the day they’ve done this to themselves.”

Catfish UK airs on MTV tonight at 9pm.

This story originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.