Catfish

[Mana1]

Have you ever been '[S-HIGHLIGHT]catfished[/S-HIGHLIGHT]' on the internet? If so, how did you find out about it / how did you react?
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I've probably been catfished twice. Luckily I never actually met these people in real life, but I suspect they probably weren't who they said they are looking back.

1) A guy called Destin who I met on a forum - he was part of a big group of online friends I had then. The pictures he shared were few and far between, with no distinguishable features and he always played up having a controlling partner as the reason behind sharing less. Looking back I'm not sure why I didn't accuse him there and then. Stupid youth!

2) A girl called Matti, who I met through the aforementioned group, seemed pretty genuine at the time. She had a pretty normal life, an on-off boyfriend, some pretty normal issues in her life - nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She didn't share photos, but as a teenage girl who wasn't very confident in her appearance I thought nothing of it. I actually put two-and-two together a few years later when I stumbled across a photo on a dating site - the picture was of Matti's "boyfriend". Looking at it a second time I noticed how generic and lacking anything recognisable it was. She did well considering I didn't suspect her at all before that though!

Share your own stories :) or any fears you have on the whole catfishing craze.​

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[maccrash]

there's only one person that I'm close with online that I haven't seen a picture of, but I don't suspect them to be anyone they're not. there's one guy who's only given me one picture in the two and a half years I've known him and I'm not 100% sure he is who he says he is but I don't think much of it; I think he's at least somewhat genuine, he's just said some things that have raised red flags in my head a couple times.

other than that, the people I'm most close with I have absolutely no doubts about them. at this point I know so much about them, have seen so many pictures of them, have seen pictures of them meeting each other, that I have no reason to believe that they're anyone other than the person I know them as.

 

[Mana1]

there's only one person that I'm close with online that I haven't seen a picture of, but I don't suspect them to be anyone they're not. there's one guy who's only given me one picture in the two and a half years I've known him and I'm not 100% sure he is who he says he is but I don't think much of it; I think he's at least somewhat genuine, he's just said some things that have raised red flags in my head a couple times.

Doesn't sound too risky! Although sometimes when you've known someone a long time it is harder to see it any other way. I think I've been tainted with suspicion since back then though :P I tend to facebook check people if I have any doubts these days.

stalkstalk

 

[Danny0317]

I've kinda done this to someone, and I'm not really proud of it... but it was hella funny..
It started off at school, my friend was telling the group of how the year before his friend got a new phone, and gave his number to his friend, but told his friend that that was a cute girl's phone number. So for about a week, his friend was texting the "cute girl" (which was his friend). The school had a field trip to somewhere in Orlando, and the kid was excited("she" told him "she" was at the stop they were gonna stop at). When they got off, his friend pointed at a random cute chick and the his friend went to her, thinking it was the girl he had been texting, and it ended up with him getting slapped. Now, when my friend told us that, we were all like "damn yo we should do this to our friend."


So for a few days, our group had been planning what we were gonna do to our friend.
I had made a kik, and put the picture of a cute white chick, and named it "Princess Brii" username was PrincessBriiXoXo or something like that. So the day before, I was on kik with my other friend, and I told him our plan, and he laughed, and told me to try it on another friend. At first, I denied, he was a pretty nice guy, but he ended up convincing me.. The whole day I kiked him, and he thought he was kiking a cute girl.. but it ended like this:

Spoiler:

(I'm the one in that picture)

Apperantly he got pissed asf, called my friend, *****ed at him, and didn't answer me for 20 minutes.. haha..

Does that count? XD

 

[Nah]

Nah, I don't think I've ever been catfished. I don't really have any online friends outside of PC, and I'm pretty sure that the ones I do have on here are being honest....unless my fellow staffers are hiding something from me. Wouldn't exactly care either if someone was trying to catfish me, since the primary targets of this are those looking for a relationship.

 

[Legobricks]

Once. It actually wasn't upsetting.

Is it catfishing (or, rather: is anyone bothered) if you don't show any pictures or specify anything personal about yourself to begin with?
Curious since I prefer to appear faceless/genderless/ageless/locationless myself, even to friends.

 

[Entermaid]

I think people are good at catfishing in the sense of not being honest about their interests, career, education, family, preferences or even their religion.

In that sense anyone online or to an extent offline can be catfished. And, I believe I have been catfished in this sense twice. So, Skype isn't fool-proof.

I will never date online again now that I am within proximity of more people; maybe use it as a tool to go out on a date, but I think I would rather use non-online methods. Which can be difficult when you never can know a person's sexual orientation.

 

[starseed galaxy auticorn]

omg yes. I used to have these friends who 'claimed' to be Japanese Rockstars. I was stupid enough to believe them at the time. I thought they were my best friends in the whole entire world. Well, I was rudely dumped by my 'japanese rockstar' boyfriend. All of those friends I had ditched me.

The thing about this is that they couldn't provide you with an actual real photo of themselves. They would claim that they couldn't because it was the law of the company they were under. A perfect excuse if you ask me. However, one of them did claim to have visited their gf though. It turns out that it wasn't true because she mentioned something about how if she met him or something that she would still love him yada yada... so... yeah.

 

[Nick]

I'm sure there have been people I ran to on the internet who were catfish. There are a few people who I personally know and am friends with who catfish for privacy reasons, but they're pretty minor. All they make up is their name. The face they show is their own, but the name they give is false. It's not a big deal to me.

 

[Corrin]

I haven't been Catfished, but I've been stalked.
This girl on LJ stalked me after I broke off our friendship, I remade like 3 times and she still did.
Then she'd name drop me on those "anonymous hate meme"s as if I didn't know it was her.

Then I just left lj and she stopped.

 

[Bellsprout]

Not that I know of, but honestly who the **** knows. Everyone I'm close with online I'm friends with on multiple forms of social media where they upload pictures of themselves plus they also snapchat me and the pictures I get match their social media soooooo. Plus I've also facetimed with two of them.

 

[Sydian]

To my knowledge, I haven't been catfished. But I have catfished, sort of. I used to use fake names online and I never put my correct age. I used to get caught all the time with online stuff and get in trouble with my mom, so I started using fake names and ages and never posted pictures. I would either make up a location or just not share it at all. So while I kind of was catfishing, it was mainly so that my mom couldn't find my stuff and to sort of protect myself from all the predators she warned me about constantly...and still does. It's rather annoying. I have enough common sense to not go meet random strangers without pictures and skype calls and such. People in 2004 though? Not that smart. I'd like to think that people in general have gotten better with identifying predators and such. But since the show Catfish exists, maybe we're not as good as I thought. lol

I'm actually still finicky about posting my real name, though. I just don't prefer people I don't know personally online calling me by it...which is funny considering people I don't know personally irl call me by it. So...what's the difference when it comes down to it? Haha. I'm a strange person though.

 

[Kenchiin]

I'm the one catfishing usually LOL!

 

[Universe]

I usually catfish in regards to my name and I used to catfish in regards to my face too. I'd either use a false picture or just not show my face at all. :D;

Had a weird stalker from a forum once go and hunt me down via email address though and like the dumb teenager I was, I had a few accounts (Facebook, Pokecommunity), attached to the same email. Needless to say I was kinda pissed since I wasn't sharing personal information about myself because privacy? Whatever that problem is solved now anyway and can't possibly happen again.

As far as being catfished? I'm pretty good at detecting a lie so it'd be really hard to pull a fast one on me - even back in the day I would catch on to people pretty quickly online!

 

[Shining Raichu]

I didn't realise there was a name for it until now lol

 

[Nah]

I didn't realise there was a name for it until now lol

There's a term for practically everything these days.

 

[Kyrul]

Damn, I was hoping for a fishing thread.

Nope, hasn't happened to me yet. I haven't really done the whole online dating thing yet.

 

[Morgnarok]

No, I have never and don't plan to ever be.

 

[Torchick08]

i got catfished hardcore.. a guy friend i talked to for months online i ended up using him as a rebound at one point and well he got stuck on that he really had feelings for me.. so him knowing im more into woman made up this elaborate story of his girlfriend coming home from france to live with him and he pretended to be her for like 2 weeks... and i fell for it. he played the girl part so convincing... i guess i should have suspected when he never posted a picture of them together or we never did a skype call with them two.... i know he is legit a guy cause we did skype call before as friends... anywho long story short after i found out i was like something is wrong with you.. and he wanted me to be all mad and show that i cared.. but i was like meh that was messed up. all in all i was just looking for a distraction at the time and well that was entertaining..

for the most part i always skype chat with people im close to on internet. so i know they are legit who they say they are. if we chat and we haven't skyped yet well then im only telling you the surface talk of my life and nothing uber personal. plus i rarely talk to anyone for more than a day. just the way it is.

 

[VeranithasVI]

I thought that this was a thread for the actual species not the online predator The only time I've ever witnessed this being done first hand was, well, when I did it. I was a member of some Macromedia Flash forums quiiiiite a while ago (I would've been about 13/14) and there was a 'crew' or something comprised of a bunch of 20-26 year old's who would create animations together, roleplay, etc, etc.

I ended up saying I was 23 with a kid, house, etc, and whenever we all met up on Skype I'd just say that the actual me was the pretend me's little brother. They either never fell for it to begin with and just let me hang out with them, or they were oblivious. Either way, I ended up being a pivotal member for a while before we all kind of just lost touch with one another.