A Melbourne man who bequeathed his multi-million dollar estate to an online partner he had never met was the victim of an elaborate catfishing scam, the Victorian Supreme Court has ruled.
The Illusory Beneficiary
William Ian Southey, aged 73, passed away on October 11, 2022. Just two months prior, he had created a will naming his ‘partner’, Kyle Stuart Jackson, as the executor and primary beneficiary of his estate, which included his Kew home later sold for $2.5 million.
Mr Southey had been married to Kaye Moseley from 1976 to 1989, and the pair remained close friends. He then spent four decades in a committed relationship with another man until that partner's death in 2017. In the years that followed, he sought companionship online and, in early 2022, formed a connection with a man he knew only as ‘Jackson’. Associate Judge Caroline Anne Goulden noted in her findings that "the deceased made his will in contemplation of his possible marriage to Mr Jackson, albeit he did not ever meet him in person."
The Unravelling of a Fiction
The will stipulated that if Jackson was unable to act as executor, Ms Moseley would step in. The day after Mr Southey's death, Ms Moseley, her solicitors at KHQ Lawyers, and Mr Southey's former solicitor, Christina Jones, attempted to contact the mysterious beneficiary.
Ms Jones managed to reach someone via an email address Mr Southey had provided. In a phone call a week later, "the person purporting to be Mr Jackson said he had never been to Australia or met the deceased in person," the court noted. He claimed to be too upset to continue the conversation.
Subsequent communications were erratic and suspicious. After initially stepping down as a beneficiary in a cryptic email, the persona later demanded to be kept informed of every step and asked for 15 per cent of the estate's value. He refused video calls, communicating only by email, and provided an image of a purported US passport for a ‘Kyle Jackson’ with a Pennsylvania address.
The Private Investigation and Court Ruling
Ms Moseley's lawyers, growing increasingly doubtful, sent documentation to the US address. A man named Jeremy Snyder then called to say no one by that name lived there. The solicitors engaged a private detective based in the United States, who concluded in July 2024 that the passport was fraudulent and that Kyle Stuart Jackson was not a real person.
Faced with this evidence, an application was made to the Supreme Court in Melbourne. In a ruling handed down in December, Associate Judge Goulden found that "the person named as Kyle Stuart Jackson does not exist in the manner understood by the deceased, or at all."
The judge ruled that Ms Moseley was entitled to distribute the estate without further regard for Jackson's interest. Under the terms of the will, she had been left $100,000, with the residue going to Jackson. With Jackson's non-existence proven, the residue of the estate, now valued at over $2 million, will be distributed to Ms Moseley.
