Getting catfished can take all sorts of forms...beware!
A Long “Fake” Relationship Ends With A Real One

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“Way back in the day of AIM chatrooms being all the rage, I loooved going in and making random new ‘friends when I wasn’t busy being a super cool eighth grader. Anyway, I met a guy who was a year older than I was and he lived in New York, not too far from me. We talked and talked and talked and eventually we started ‘dating.’ This continued for years. literally… years. Five of them. All through high school, I was too shy/awkward/insecure to talk to guys and thought no one would ever like me that I just had this ridiculous online relationship. When it came time for college, we ‘broke up.’ I started to date actual people, but I still occasionally talked to this guy. Three years ago, that ‘old flame’ came back. We were chatting one night like it was 2005 again and he told me he had something to tell me. It took hours and hours to get out of him, but in the end he sent me an email. He was a she. Naturally, I freaked, but we kept talking and she was actually literally just the girl version of the guy I thought she was. I had come out of the closet as bisexual a few years prior, and I started to date this girl I thought was a guy for almost a decade. I loved her just the same.”
A Guy Ends Up In A Scary Situation With An Underage Catfisher

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“Twice. Both times they were underage but led me to believe they were the same age I was.
The first time, it was a girl who sent me pictures of her older sister, who was around my age. When we finally met for our first date, I realized that she was not the girl from the pictures because she was barely 18 and was enormous compared to the girl I had pictures of. She was apologetic, and explained that she sent me pictures of her sister instead of herself for various reasons. The lie about her age was only a slight problem because she had just turned 18 days before so I wasn’t in any legal danger. We remained friends for years.
The second time was the last time I tried to meet a girl online. I was a junior in college and had been talking to this girl a few states away for weeks online. She claimed to be 19 (I was 20) and she was a cute red head in the pics she sent me, so I chatted her up regularly even though she lived far away. At some point, she surprises me with her plan to take a bus out to my university and spend the weekend hanging out and partying with me. When I picked her up at the bus stop I barely recognized her. She sort of looked like the cute redhead I had pictures of, but waaaaaay younger, like she could be the daughter of the girl I had been talking to online. I played it cool, trying to be a gentleman, but quickly decided that spending the weekend partying with what appears to be a 14-16 year old would be a bad idea. I told her that there were no good parties on the docket and took her home to my parents house where I figured we could lay low until Sunday when I could shuffle her back onto a bus and be rid of the jailbait.
Well, late the next evening while we were sitting on the living room floor watching a movie with my parents, the phone rings. I answered the phone to hear a crying woman pleading to know where her daughter was and if she is ok. That’s when it hit me… I was harboring a freakin’ teenage runaway. I got the girl on the phone with her mom, and started grabbing all of her stuff and putting in my car. Apparently her mom had found my phone number on their phone bill and traveled to my school looking for her daughter. I promised to meet her on campus with her daughter ASAP. Well, we didn’t even make it out of the driveway before the police cars showed up. The cop looked at me, then pointed to the girl and said, ‘Is that her?’ and I replied, ‘yeah, take her home man’ and that was it. Luckily for me, I think this girl may have had a history of running away from home because they didn’t ask me a single question or anything they just took the girl and left. Then my mom came out into the driveway asking why the cops were there… I had some ‘splainin’ to do. And then, when I returned to school, all of my roommates and neighbors told me that the campus police, local police, and state police had been scouring the campus for me and an underage runaway. I spent the next couple weeks explaining to everyone I knew how I got hoodwinked by an internet girl and that the police had the story wrong. It could have gone worse I suppose…”
A Fake Marine Issues Real Threats

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“Nothing serious because I caught it quickly but a guy claimed he was a Marine and posted a bunch of photos that he captioned ‘Me in Afghanistan’ and the like. They were all different sizes / crappy resolution. A quick reverse google image search proved they were taken largely from articles written about military training exercises held in Nevada and one even had the subject’s name and rank, which wasn’t even close to the name he’d given me. I called him on it and he felt the way to rectify it and prove he was real was to send me a bunch of dick pics. From there it got even better. The photos were of obviously different dicks. They looked nothing alike and another reverse image search brought up dozens of gay porn sites. I called him on that, too, and he proceeded to threaten me for disrespecting the Marine Corps. It was actually kind of hilarious how terrible he was at it.”
A Friend Gets Taking In By Greed, Friend Saves Him

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“Friend and I frequent dating sites. He was catfished once. Her name was Alexis McNally. She was the head RN at a hospital a half hour away making $150,000 a year and was in love with my friend. She was going to fly him to Vegas after 3 weeks of knowing him and they were going to get married. He was happy as hell and thinking of pretty much nothing but the money and the hot pictures she was sending him. She said she bought him all this stuff and his kids iPads and computers and that she had a multimillion dollar house she was going to live in with him. He didn’t think anything was odd but I did so I did some research. First I called the hospital and they said they never heard of her. Then looked up her phone number which the area code was from Ohio. After a while he wised up and started calling her out on stuff. She ended up sending him a box filled with new American Eagle clothes for him and that was pretty much the end of it.”
She Lied About Her Age, She Lied About Her Looks, She Lied About Everything

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“13 years ago, I was 18 years old, very awkward, but still felt respectable. I had my own car and a job. I didn’t go to college though, and I didn’t know any way to meet people except through the Internet. I remember I found Jessie on an online forum. She said she was 19 and lived less than an hour’s drive from me. In Los Angeles, that’s not bad. She sent me her picture and she was beautiful. We exchanged phone numbers.
We would talk for HOURS on the phone. I forget everything we talked about, but I really connected with her. She was smart, had a mature, sexy voice, and was studying to be a doctor at UCLA. Eventually, we started having phone sex and cyber sex. I discovered that the mere sound of me ‘purring’ by rolling an infinite ‘r’ could actually make her orgasm. Wow!
We tried to meet a couple times, but she got nervous and chickened out. I wasn’t suspicious though. I mean, the Internet was new for a lot of people and it was understandable that someone would be nervous about meeting a stranger like that. Never the less, I told my real life friends about her. I introduced her to the online hangouts I frequented. She got to know my people and she charmed them as much as she did me. They all thought I was really lucky.
One day, over the phone, Jessie invited me to come see her perform at a play and I got really excited. But she broke down crying and was inconsolable for a few minutes while I tried to figure out what had set her off. She told me that she had a confession to make. When I finally convinced her to just tell me, I had slowed my breathing down and was a picture of serenity, ready to have reality driven into the back of my skull like a railroad spike.
She wasn’t 19, she was 14. She wasn’t a student at UCLA, she was a student at one of those ‘special needs’ high schools in the Valley. She wasn’t beautiful, she was fat and ugly. The play wasn’t Shakespeare, it was Seussical, and she was the elephant.
I don’t know why I agreed to see it. I guess I held out some sliver of hope that she was lying to test my resolve or that she had some hidden quality that shined through all of the stuff that had just been dumped onto me. I drove up to the school and felt like a creep. Her mother was there, with a shiner that the father had given her. Apparently Jessie had told her mother about me, and it was her mother who recognized me and invited me to sit beside her. There’s something sad about how, in the pure pathetic nature of this whole situation, the miserable, battered mother actually thought her developmentally challenged daughter had an admirer. I declined silently, hating that I was a part of this, still wondering what I was doing.
The lights went down and the curtain was drawn. And there she was, bounding around on the stage. Clearly the most talented of special kids. Clearly the largest of them, too. During intermission, I stood up and walked outside, into the parking lot. I got into my car and drove away. I turned my stereo off and sat silently, listening to the road for an hour. I never spoke to her again and I never told any of my friends what happened to her.”
Woman Gets Catfished, But Ends Up With A Lot Of Free Stuff

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“A fairly attractive Asian girl started messaging me in a chat room on gay.com. I am lesbian, and the gay.com chatrooms for the women weren’t really known for having bots. She comes on strong and actually shows a lot of interest in me even though I didn’t really have much interest in her at first since she was in Florida and I’m in Oklahoma. I actually start to really like her and think maybe we could really hit it off if we met. We started talking/texting pretty much 24/7.
Then she tells me about how she can’t date anyone locally because her dad is a marine engineer and builds multimillion dollar yachts for famous people.
I don’t really believe it at first, but she starts mailing me all these fairly expensive things like clothes, flowers, gift cards, etc to ‘prove’ it, even though I tell her I didn’t really want them.
The weird thing is she wouldn’t tell me her last name and would be very weird about it, saying if I found it out I could Google it and it’ll pull up her dad’s yacht business and I could see how rich they really are and she wanted to make sure that I really wanted to be with her and wasn’t just in it for the money…. Even though she kept sending me gifts without me asking to ‘prove’ her wealth.
She also said she was a head hair stylist at Tony&Guy and made $700/day in tips.
Anyway, one of the gifts she sent the company sent a receipt slip that had her last name on it. I Googled it and nothing really pulled up. Even (name) Yachts, nothing. (Name) yachts Florida, nothing. Nothing at all came up for it.
Things started to seem weird so I called the Tony&Guy she claimed she worked at and asked if I could schedule with her. No one worked there with that name.
I waited a couple days to tell her that her name came on the receipt.
When I did she flipped out and said I was crazy and that she was going to stop talking to me anyway because she has cancer then hung up on me and disconnected the number within minutes.
It was so weird. I don’t know what the point of that catfish was, I’m the one who got a bunch of stuff, and I didn’t even ask for any of it.
Oh well, I still wear some of the stuff she got me lol”
2 Guys Catfishing Each Other

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“I used to be on a chat-site a few times when I was 17 or so. Everyone asked age and sex (male/female) and most of them would disconnect when you said you were a male, so at one moment I told people I was female just to be able to talk to people.
Anyway, I connected to a girl and we had a great time together, we chatted for two hours or so I believe before we gave each other our skype adress.. I had to create mine in a quick hurry because I didn’t have a fake girly-skype adress that matched my fake name.
We went on to chat almost every day just for fun and even though I knew I was lying to her by being a girl I still had some fun but I really felt guilty for lying to her, and I knew we couldn’t meet in real life (even though we lived close to each other).
One day, she confessed that she was lying to me about something… That thing turned out to be that she was a guy as well. We kept contact and we had a great time together still and we actually met each other once. He died two years later though but still, good times.”
Woman Claims To Be “Dr. Sam”, More Like Dr. Sham

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“My very good friend Ben’s dad has always had an online girlfriend called ‘Dr. Sam.’ She was the reason Ben’s parents divorced about 12 years ago. I don’t know the story of early Dr. Sam, just that she claimed to be a doctor of some kind, and also some kind of cancer.
Steve (Ben’s dad) sent Dr. Sam all kinds of money. Enough that his wife divorced him. When those little hands-free phone headsets came out, he got one and was on the phone with her literally every second of the day. She would make him talk to her cats on the phone, and he’d be places like the grocery store, meowing into a headset no one could see.
He tried to visit her many times, but every time he had his tickets squared away, her cancer would come back and she’d need emergency medical treatment, or (I kid you not) her pet tiger would bite her and she’d go to the hospital.
Steve is a high-ranking Naval officer. When he had to go to Afghanistan a few years ago, he sent his cat to live with Dr. Sam. She had it put down immediately, because ‘he wasn’t happy.’
Eventually, Dr. Sam claimed to have died.”
This Catfisher Changes Gender and Then Ghosts On The Girl

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“About 10 years ago I started chatting with a guy in one of the Yahoo chatrooms. We had only been chatting for a few weeks when suddenly he disappeared offline for about 2 weeks. I was so worried but then his ‘sister’ contacted me and told me he’d been in a terrible motorcycle accident. He was in ICU, but ‘she’ kept in touch with me to let me know how he was. After about a month, he got back online and we talked every day. We traded pics and eventually I got on webcam to say hi. He couldn’t do the same because of some issues with his computer. We talked like this for nearly 3 years. It was around this time that I realized his ‘sister’ was actually him. It didn’t matter though. I was besotted with him and I mean totally head over heels. Then one day he just disappeared. His profile was deleted, all his accounts were gone and I have not heard a single word from him since. I still have absolutely no idea who he/she really was and it messed up for a long time. I still think about at times. I would do anything to know the truth.”
Girl Lies When She Shouldn’t Have

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“I was about 16 at the time (24 now), and I had just discovered the social website Vampire Freaks (VF). . . judge me now if you’d like but I liked it. Back than Facebook hadn’t become huge and MySpace made it too difficult to find people in your area with similar interest. VF had a huge collection of gamers, cosplayers, otaku and ‘nerds,’ which is my thing.
Ran into the girl that I thought was the love of my 16 year old life, we had the same interest, we talked on msn voice chat numerous times and sent ‘recent’ pictures to each other all the time. It was awesome, we had a great time and generally seemed to connect really well. After 3 months I decided it was time to meet, I lived in Southern NJ and her in Upper NY, it was a bit of a hike. I lied to my mom and told her I was going to Philly, which was only a 15 min train ride, and set off on an adventure of epic proportion. After hopping on two trains and walking for 2 hours, 5 hours total, I had finally arrived at our meeting point, a cafe in her neighborhood.
I was waiting in line to get a cup a of coffee when suddenly a monstrous shadow that could be compared to the sun caught the corner of my eye. Chills went down my spine, as I heard my name get called out. The girl who had just sent me a picture last night had gained 120 pounds, and caused the ground the quake beneath her. Having little to no experience of the outside world I panicked, turned and said the most disappointing greeting of my life. I ended up spending the rest of the day with her, I tried not to be a jerk and bring up the fact that she lied to me. In the end she went for the kiss and I just gave her the cheek.
I probably would’ve dated her if she hadn’t lied to me, I’m a romantic and feel as though beauty is on the inside. But if she could lie about something like that, what’s to stop her from something even bigger.”
Kerry Meets Kelly Who’s Really Kenny And It Ends Tragically

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“In my sophomore year of college, my friend Kerry (male, 19) met a girl named Kelly in a chat room. They talked a lot, and got close. One day, Kelly revealed that her boyfriend beat her up and broke her jaw. Kerry drove to a city a few hours away to rescue her, and learned that Kelly was really Kenny.
Kenny tortured Kerry into giving up all his passwords, and then murdered him and left his corpse in a field. Then Kenny impersonated Kerry online for several days in an attempt to cover his tracks.
He did a bad job, and got caught, and killed himself in jail before trial.”
The Catfisher Has Some Issues

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“My best friend has Catfished several dudes, back when MySpace was a big thing. She had very complex systems and fake profiles/photos, and she even stole some of my blogs and posted them as her own. She was significantly larger than the photos she posted (they were stolen from a classmate’s profile), and she would meet the guys after months of intimate phone/email conversations, then guilt-trip them into continuing the hang out with her. She told them it was her personality that mattered, don’t be shallow, etc. It was some shady stuff, obviously rooting from deep self-esteem issues. Luckily she grew out of it.”
Even The Victims Can FeelBad For The Catfishers

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“I met a girl on OKC, very nice, we clicked pretty quickly and talked for about a month before deciding to meet up. There were no immediate red flags in her profile and her pictures looked legit.
We agreed on a park (I’m a cheap date, what can I say?) for our first meeting and I was lying back on a grassy hill when I hear a voice say my name. I look up and see…someone I don’t recognize at all. I was confused and asked her if I knew her. She was quiet for a second before revealing it was the girl I’d been talking to.
She looked radically different from her pictures; the girl I saw in the pictures was quite pretty, very fit, looked like she took good care of herself. The girl that showed up…less so. She was much plainer looking, much more weight than the girl in the photos, and much less sure of herself now.
I asked her why she’d lied, especially considering that I actually did find her real self attractive. She burst into tears and said she was so scared that people wouldn’t like her that she felt like she had to do this. She had a lot of self-image problems, her shirt sleeve slipped up a couple times and there were a lot of scars.
Initially I was upset. I’m a really chill, good natured dude (at least I try to be) and I really hate when people take advantage of that. We talked for a little while and she admitted she was terrified of people and their reaction to how she looked and that this approach helped her get past that. I explained that lying about it wasn’t going to help.
We actually had a pretty good conversation and kept in touch after that but she stopped responding to pretty much everything about two months later. She stopped answering her phone and the texts dropped off. I hope she’s alright and that she stopped catfishing people. It was a shame because I did actually find her attractive and she wasn’t a horrendous human being but I can’t start a relationship on that big of a lie.
After that, I’ve started looking on catfishers with a little more empathy. A lot of them are people who have social issues and don’t mean to be malicious or to hurt people. That doesn’t make it more acceptable, but it’s easier to understand.”
Another Catfisher Lies About Her Looks, But This One Ends Nicely

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“Started chatting with a girl on a BBS in the early nineties. This moved to the internet when that became more popular.
Finally decided to meet after 4 years. From the photos of her I had seen I was looking for a skinny white girl, she turned out to be an overweight Asian girl. She brought 4 friends with her to meet me as well which was a bit awkward. I ended up sneaking out of the bar we had arranged to meet at after about 30 minutes as I was really embarrassed and her friends were asking me if I was still interested in her.
Her personality was still the same and all the stories she had told were hers but she was afraid I wouldn’t be interested if I knew what she looked like.
I still speak to her every couple of months now 20 years later.”
A Guy’s Brother Catfishes An Innocent Man Outside Of The Country

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“About 6 years ago I found out my brother was a catfish. He had been catfishing this young man in the UK whilst being in America. He had fake pictures, a fake name but his real phone number. The guy being catfished -we’ll call him Lenny- would repeatedly call my brother and leave messages on our house phone. My brother and Lenny often sent each other packages of sweets. Lenny made the decision to come to America to visit, since he’s never been. My brother agreed. On the day Lenny arrived in Texas my brother told him the truth, but never actually met up with Lenny. Lenny tried all week trying to convince my brother to meet him, telling him he just wanted to know who he really was. My brother never showed. Lenny called religiously everyday for about a month trying to get my brother back. I think he really loved him. After that I never heard from him again”
A Girls Mother Sets Her Straight, Best Friend Doesn’t Get The Message

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“I met this young man named ‘Shane’ on the a chat forum when I was 13. My best friend was 16 and so was ‘Shane.’ He lived in Holland and we would chat daily. I told my mom about our international friend and she reminded me that ‘you never know who you’re talking to on the Internet.’ I got freaked out and wouldn’t talk to Shane for a couple of months, while my best friend would still talk to him daily.
The strange thing was, Shane shared an email address with his sister ‘Rowena’ and we had only ever seen one picture of ‘Shane.’ Whatever, not many people back then had digital cameras or video cameras.
My best friend fell madly in love with Shane and, like I said, talk to him daily. They talked about meeting up but something would always get in the way, even when my friend was in holland with her family. We also found the same picture of Shane on vampire freaks, which was weird, because it was under a different name.
After years of talking, like four freaking years, my best friend received on email from her lover. He told her there was something he needed to tell her and was just so embarrassed about but he had been hiding something for quite some time and to look for an email to her about it. She responded and waited for the email for months, it never came, she never heard from Shane again. She sent emails and instant messages to Shane, but he never responded again.
She started digging and she found Shane’s sisters, Rowena’s, social media site. On it were all the photos and drawings Shane had been sending her for years claiming that they were his. Pictures of Shane’s new shoes, of a drawing he had made for my best friend, all of Shane’s favorite bands, ect. My best friend then realized he had not fallen in love with Shane, but a girl from holland named Rowena.
It’s been four? Years since she’s spoken to Shane, and the first year after they stopped talking she sent Rowena an email letting her know that she knows that Shane never existed. I know deep down she still wants answers, but I’m pretty sure shell never get them.”