People Share Their Craziest, Borderline-Dangerous Catfish Stories
“I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin.”—Vince Pierce.
In the online sense of the word, a “catfish” is simply someone who fakes being someone else via social media. While some catfish are simply trolling, there are online liars out there who just want love—and money—as much as the so-called “
honest” folk of the great wide web. Sometimes the catfish is handy with photoshop or image-sourcing; other times, the con works out because people will believe what they want to believe.
After all, isn’t a super-cool online person who likes us from afar so much “safer” than IRL love?
For the users who shared their real-life catfish stories on Reddit, IRL certainly got scary and weird when the catfish became more than pixels and emojis.
After reading these stories, I bet some of us will be doing a reverse search on our profile pics…just to be sure we aren’t being used as bait in someone else’s lure.
From the misled victims to the perplexed perps, cringe to these 42 freaky encounters with online catfish.
42. A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Lies
To start I want to say that if fat people want to be fat, that's fine. Own it. I personally choose not to be.
I am very active and try to eat healthy-ish and being very active (hike, bike, climb or some other active outside thing almost every day of the week) is very important to me.
I met this girl on Tinder or some site and she looked super cute; a little curvy in all the right ways, incredible skin and these crazy green eyes. We chatted for a while and agreed to meet at a local bar.
The girl who met me was not that girl. She was about 275lbs, 5'5"-5'6" ish, horrible skin that look like she wiped her face off with the greasy bottom of a fast food bag, and these sullen dark brown eyes.
Clearly the pictures were of her to some degree because I could see her in the pictures.
After we said our hello's and got a drink there was a long awkward silence. Nothing to talk about. We had talked about how she also enjoyed being active outside and everything, but I did not get that impression from our initial conversation.
I decided to jump right in and asked if she sometimes wore colored contacts, to which she replied no, she just liked the way it made her look.
Some more less than subtle probing from me (I was annoyed that I clearly had been deceived onto a date) and she admitted she was a graphic designer, and quite talented with Photoshop. She basically photoshopped herself into a 5'9"
tall, 165lb, green-eyed, fair-skinned bombshell.
She admitted she had photoshopped herself to get dates. I was dumbfounded. No, I probably would not have gone out with her if she had been real, but I know there are guys that would have, who maybe didn't care about the lifestyle things I care about.
But the fact that she had intentionally deceived me made me despise her. She then had the audacity to claim that I was an asshole because I never "gave her a real shot.”
41. A Little Help From My “Friends”
I used to be on Greatestjournal and had a group of friends over there. We were all ages 17-25. There was one girl, I forgot her name, but I think it was Nelly or something, who was really nice and smart but had problems at home.
She asked me to borrow money a couple of times and said we should meet up somehow and hang out, but I never gave her anything or gave her personal information. Other girls gave her their numbers or addresses so they could hang out.
I forgot how, but one of them found out that she was actually a 50-something woman who was stuck at home on disability and was bored.
It's not as bad as a lot of the stories on here, but it was still creepy.
40. There’s No Business Like Shady Business
Weirdly, someone used a photo of me in last year's Halloween costume I posted to Reddit to make an OKCupid account in the UK. So apparently, she's catfishing this one guy and he looked up the image source which led him here.
He messaged me about it and sent me the link, I sent OKC some proof it was me and had it taken down. Pretty shady business.
39. Caught Swiping
I was single and on Tinder. I saw my sister's boyfriend on there and thought, what the heck is this?
I made a fake profile to catfish him and talked to him for a bit—it was obviously him, and I got his number. Showed it to my sister and she broke up with him.
