“The Most Evil Thing I've Ever Done”: 46 Catfish Encounters That Left People Shocked, Hurt, Or Laughing

It was when I was a teenager, not too long after the birth of ICQ. I had met this one person in a chat room, and things started to get more and more personal. Not too long later, they eventually broke down and admitted that they had been lying, and that they weren't a young hot girl but instead a man.

The guy seemed really remorseful, and I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I actually wasn't a young hot lesbian either.

About seven years ago, I catfished my then-boyfriend because I had a hunch he was cheating on me. I'd caught him chatting online with other women a couple of times already, s**ting, begging for n**es, trying to get them to come over, etc. He cried and groveled each time I caught him — it was just chatting, he wasn't actually gonna do anything, he'll never do it again, blah blah blah. I didn't catch him again for a while, but I just had that feeling, you know? I should have just dumped him after the first offense, I know, but I was a lot more naive in my 20s. I made a fake profile with some random hot girl's pictures, named myself Ashley Adams, and made up a backstory that included cheerleading and n**e modeling.

The profile was comically fake, but I knew he'd fall for it because t**s were involved. I friended him and waited for him to send the first chat. I didn't have to wait long, either. As soon as he popped online, he took the bait. 'Hey s**y, wanna chat?' Why yes, 'Ashley' would love to chat! He asked me for n**es, asked me where I lived, and was happy to hear that I only lived one town over and could be there in half an hour. I agreed to come over, he gave me his address, and told me to just come right in and jump on him. Oh, that motherf**ker...I knew it.

I waited about 15 minutes before heading over to his apartment. I went right in like he requested, and I saw his expression change from excitement to 'oh s**t' when he saw me walk in instead of Ashley. I could tell he was trying hard to come up with a reason why I couldn't stay, but I made myself right at home. I just sat there watching him squirm and glance nervously at the front door every time he heard a noise. He must have been terrified, expecting Ashley to show up any minute while his girlfriend was cuddled up right there next to him. I hung out for several hours just relishing in his discomfort, and then left him with blue balls after he realized Ashley wasn't gonna show. He tried to get frisky with me, but I said, 'Sorry, babe, I'm suddenly not feeling very well!' I dumped him a few days later. I gotta say, catfishing him was actually pretty fun.

Oh boy this is gonna be a fun story.

I used to be on omegle (a chat-site) a few times when I was 17 or so. Everyone asked age and s*x (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 address.. I had to create mine in a quick hurry because I didn't have a fake girly-skype address 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 d**d two years later though but still, good times.

MIL had just gotten a computer and she was losing her grip on reality as she aged.

My husband and I didn’t have a computer yet so we didn’t know the dangers she faced. One of her other sons set the thing up for her.

Long story short she met some man on the internet who *convinced her he was her [late] husband.*

She was on a fixed income so had to go to her son to get the bulk of the money he was asking for.

The son shut things down real quick, but the poor woman was sure we were keeping her husband from her for the rest of her days.

Back in the early 2000's when the internet still had kind of a "wild west" vibe and law enforcement hadn't quite caught up yet (no sting operations, no "to catch a predator"), I'd go on chatrooms claiming to be a 12 year old girl and when guys contacted me I'd give them each others phone numbers or send them to each others houses.

I (26F) was on Tumblr one night a found a website similar to Omegle where you could randomly talk to strangers over chat. I met "Charlie" (M) and we hit it it off. We talked for upwards of 8 months via text and it was fairly serious, but I never would commit because I couldn't verify his identity online ANYWHERE and I knew he was hiding it from me (I'm generally a very good detective, and I couldn't find anything). About 8 months in, my friend helped me discover that he was really a SHE named Rachel, living a few hours from me. Cue shock and and anger. After all of the shock wore off, I jumped in my car to go meet her, and everything was great from there. We've been together for almost 5 years, one of which was long distance, and we're now engaged and getting married next fall. Up until meeting her, I had never dated women, only men. I'm fairly open minded, and I honestly think sexuality is a very grey area, so it wasn't a HUGE deal to me to end up with a woman, just not something I thought would really happen. Now we have a house, a dog, and are planning our wedding.

I met someone through the Gossip Girl subreddit. We talked for a while and planned a weeklong trip to New York together. The week before the trip, they canceled, but I'd already dropped $400 on two tickets to Wicked on Broadway. Well, I went to New York for Wicked anyway. I found a fellow redditor who lived in NYC and gave her the second ticket for free. We saw the show, and she took me to an awesome restaurant around the corner from the Gershwin. Sure, I got catfished, but I made a new friend, ate good food, and saw Wicked on Broadway.

In college I was swiping right on everyone on Tinder. One girl wanted to just meet up in the campus gardens and make out. It was cold out, I bundled up, headed over. Why not? She wasn't there. I messaged her a couple times and she responded with stuff like "on my way" and "meet at this exact spot."

My terrible iPhone4 battery was dying, so I couldn't message her anymore. I started walking around the gardens, watching the meeting spot but not hanging out there. It wasn't long before a few other dudes showed up in the general area and were all suspiciously checking their phones at regular intervals.

I realized what was going on and just went home. Never heard from that match again.

It's a bit embarrassing to admit I was catfished... But I was.

About 10-11 years ago, I started talking to a guy on Myspace. I'm pretty sure he messaged me first, and at first we just talked about tattoos and stuff since I had JUST got an apprenticeship at a shop. The guy said he knew my friend ... Let's call her "Amanda." So I talked to Amanda, and she said she knew the guy and they grew up together and what not. Anyway, guy and I keep talking online and of course I developed feelings. We'd talk on the phone for hours and finally after a few weeks, we agreed to meet up.

This was before the show catfish... And what do ya know? Guy doesn't show up. He wouldn't answer his phone and I was waiting around like a j*****s. Hours later, he calls, saying he is sorry. His phone d**d and he got lost and we'd try again another day. I stupidly ate up the b.s., forgave him, and agreed to meet him another time.

The next time, I brought Amanda and her girlfriend to meet this guy. Even though Amanda vouched for this guy, he didn't show up again. Again, I'm feeling like an idiot and I'm crying, so Amanda and her gf drive me home. Immediately I go online and "break up" with this dude I never met.

We still talked for 6 months after that, with me questioning if he was real... But after that, he was supposedly vacationing around Europe and I wasn't trying to persue anything anymore. I would still hang out with Amanda, and she would tell me that the guy called her and had some crazy stories about Amsterdam, or Paris or wherever.

Well, about a year ago I got a message on FB from a girl. She asked if I knew _____ (Myspace guy) and if I had ever met him. I told her no, I never met him. She messaged me back that Amanda told her I had met this guy and that she had a brief online relationship with the guy. Then, one night, this girl was staying at Amanda's house when she was sick and I guess her voice was hoarse. She said it sounded exactly like the guy she was talking to online. She confronted Amanda and Amanda came clean.

So, my "friend" of 10+ years catfished me while she had a gf. I always wondered why she was a little clingy for a friend and hated all my boyfriends. Now I know. I haven't confronted her yet, but I also haven't talked to her for a year. I feel like she most likely knows that I know now. It hurts that a good friend did that to me.

Tl;Dr : my friend of 10+ years catfished me, didn't find out until recently.

I was catfished. Not in a romantic relationship, but in a friendship. Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I started talking to a guy named Zack online. We spoke daily on MSN Messenger for a year or two, but never bothered video chatting. He was 16 like me, told me about his family, how his mother and sister abandoned him, how he'd never met his dad, etc. One day, he came online and just didn't seem right.

"I asked him if he was OK, if something had happened at school, or with his friends. He told me he wanted to chat on webcam. When I turned the webcam on, I saw a 14-year-old girl. I had been talking to her the whole time.

Zack d**d a few years before we started chatting, and when he d**d, his little sister took on his personality as a coping mechanism. She had finally told her mum she was speaking with me, and her mum got on to explain a few things. The sister believed she was Zack. She would talk like he did, introduce herself to people as Zack, etc. I was shocked and upset. I really enjoyed my chats with Zack, but to think he was never actually alive during the time I was talking to him is so strange. I still struggle to get my head around it.

Older brother (late 20s) was catfished in recent years and it was dramatic.

He's an emotional guy, always had a hard time dating and never really got over the emotional damage of having an alcoholic, on-again/off-again parent.

Enter the scene a young doctor in training from Australia who was doing her residency in a nearby city. Pretty, went to Harvard, actually royalty on her mother's side. Some might say too good to be true.

She was always busy with her doctor schooling so meeting was hard. They spoke on the phone but mostly texted. The initial connection was online but we never heard what website. After a while the family starts teasing him that she may not be real and he starts trying harder to meet in person to prove that the love of his life was, in fact, real.

Then begins the series of family deaths. Every holiday he would invite her to our family's get-together to meet everyone and prove that she's real. First an uncle d**d, then a grandmother, then a grandfather, then another uncle. Every. Single. Time. And she would have to fly back to Australia or the country her family was royalty in to deal with the deaths. Brother defended her every time. "Do you know how hard it is to lose so many people so fast? You all have no sympathy." Etc.

After months of hearing about how they're going to buy a house together and he would get dual citizenship and whisk us all away to Australia everyone was pretty tired of it. He had let his lease expire and moved into mom's house until they bought their own together with her doctor money. He had taken time off work to see her and then wasted it when she didn't show up. Work was mad at him for taking a lot of days off in a short timespan. Things were tense.

She went MIA suddenly one day. No texts, nothing. We had been supposed to meet her the same day. A month later she reappears. Girlfriend's royal, psycho mother didn't like that she was seeing an American peasant and had gotten her arrested. While getting unarrested, she lost her diabetes medication (oh, shes also diabetic. Didn't everyone know?) And had gone into a coma. But of course she called as soon as she woke up and made everything better. How could we be such terrible people to doubt this story? The poor girl almost d**d!

Anyways. After a no-show for a promised Pats game (because her father d**d on the way to pick brother up) we think he may have started to get disillusioned and have some doubts.

In the end, brother just had to know. He took his first trip outside of the USA to go to her home and find her. We never found out what happened on the trip but he never talked about her again.

(Information left out for privacy).

I recently found out that someone has been using my pictures to catfish people for over 10 years! A woman my age has been pretending to be me (a guy) and has been in an online relationship with two girls! She made over 15 Facebook profiles using my family and friends' pictures and at least eight Twitter accounts to make things seem more believable.
She created a twin brother for 'me' and photoshopped me into pictures of myself to make it seem like there were two of me. The twin d**d at some point, and the original 'me' used to check in at a crematorium with a Facebook memory now and then. One of the girls thought something wasn't right and did some investigation. Eventually, she tracked me down and everything started to unravel. I spent four hours at the police station yesterday trying to describe all of this in a statement.

I was maybe 18 or 19. I started talking to a girl on some social media site. I was dumb, and missed an obvious red flag where suddenly decided she wanted to be called a different name. This was during a pretty rough point in my life(dropped out of college, s****y job, very few/no friends), so even though it was weird, I didn't question it. Also didn't ask for actual proof of who she said she was, since I was naïve and thought well why would she lie, and it's not like the pictures she used were unbelievably hot so it didn't stand out.

I didn't really get the sense knocked into me to start questioning it until the cliché "got badly hurt in a car accident" happened, which had me freaking out and wanting to fly there(she was in CA, I was in PA). After half a day of worrying, she calls and said she made it up because I had been "neglecting her." Being a d*****s desperate for love, I didn't cut it off immediately, but I decided one day to actually google her name and her "original" name, and whaddya know, different people in the same town and pictures of her matching the original. Questioned her, and she admitted to lying because she knew the girl and was jealous of her so she pretended to be her and got caught up in the lie after falling in love. Told her to never contact me again, and that was it.

Basically I'm a f*****g d*****s who doesn't see red flags.

Not sure if it fits, but - irl I am a girl. For a while in WoW I pretended to be a man. I wanted to push rated bgs but got tired of b******t "O yeah girl, 100% carried and plz send n**es ". Removed people I was not close with from btag, name changed, set up voice changer. Close friends knew it's me. One evening we play, everything is great. I am calling in my manly voice PS, MD, dispel of bop, etc. Suddenly my dog starts to bark. Rbg grp goes quiet for a moment. And someone says: OK either someone has T-Rex in the room or voice changer fail. I had to come clean about not being a dude.

Met someone on OkCupid. He was moving from NYC to my city, said he was a surgeon. That was my first red flag. I wondered why a successful surgeon was on a free dating site.

We chatted for two weeks, but he didn't want to talk on the phone. Red flag #2. At this point I assume he's a fake.

He deleted his profile, saying he couldn't wait to meet me in 3 weeks when he was scheduled to fly in for a weekend to find a condo. I reverse searched his picture and found another profile, same story, but it said he was moving to Phoenix. Red flag #3.


At this point, I know he's fake but now I'm having fun making him think I'm totally hooked. He gave me bad med advice when I sprained my ankle, then told me he had a foot f****h and he would be making sure I would get daily pedicures when I quit my job and move in with him.

The weekend he was supposed to fly in, his current almost former boss "d**d" and he couldn't make it. I sent him screenshots of his other profile and told him I knew all along and had just been f*****g with him.

Good times.

Not me but an old gf of mine.

We were teens. She was sending n**es to some 17-year old guy. (Yes while we were dating, but I didn’t hold it against her. Honestly I just felt bad. We still broke up for it though). She had no idea he wasn’t who he said he was until the FBI showed up at her door. They said he was some 40-something year old ex con. They were doing a huge investigation into the guy and were contacting all the victims before arresting him.

She had to go through every text, every picture, and times they talked and what about and all of that. I sat there with her going through it all. Which was not easy, she couldn’t look me in the eyes the whole time. She could have had me leave, I offered to, but she insisted I stay because she needed my support at the time. So I did stay. After all was said and done, and they left. We went out to eat with her family. Had as good a time as we could. Then I broke up with her and explained why when we got back to her house and I left. Haven’t spoken since.


I haven’t been catfished myself other than the standard flattering pics to not show weight or other features that weren’t flattering.

I got catfished twice, long before the term even became a thing. 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. Luckilly 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...

I got played by a girl I met in an online game, not sure what her end game was because she never got that far.

We became friends and started talking she told me she was a nursing student going to school back east but planned to move back to California after she finished. After a few months we seemed to be interested in each other and she said that she would be coming to visit friends in Cali that lived about 2 hours away and when she finished school she would try to get a nursing job in that town and maybe we could test the waters with each other.

She cancelled her visit because she had "too much school work" but stayed in touch. Things just started to bother me she talked like a young student most of the time but other times the way she phrased things just came off as odd to me and she was very reluctant to ever video chat or cam with me at all.

When my suspicion hit its peak I started investigating. I took her chat name and ran it through a social media search engine and it returned a MySpace page using the same name (yes this was many moons ago when MySpace was the s**t)

It turned out that this 22 year old nursing student was actually a 45 year old nurse in Massachusetts. I ran the pictures of "her" that she had sent me through messenger through reverse image searching and found them all to be professional shots of amateur models.

I messaged her real MySpace account asking her for an explanation and told her she could give it to me over messenger or maybe I'd come see her in person since her MySpace had pictures of her at work, at home, all of her personal s**t everywhere.

She deleted her messenger account, her Myspace, her email address, her account in the game we played, everything she vanished in less than 2 hours and I never heard from her again.

Not sure what her master plan was but she didn't like being exposed. I emailed the head nurse where she worked with the whole story and lots of screenshots in case the patients she was talking about were real and asked the nurse if this was the type of professional behavior she expected from her staff. She emailed me back with just a thank you, an apology for what happened, and said she'd investigate but I never heard from her again either.

I met this Welsh girl on 4chan that was into a lot of the same bands as I was, liked the same comedians as I did and shared a lot of my political views. She was f*****g awesome, and we stayed up all night talking about anything and everything. We went on to spend a good 6-8 hours almost every single day talking pretty much constantly for the next 3 months - she was amazing - funny as f**k, had really interesting opinions on a lot of things, introduced me to a ton of new music & films and was just generally a really lovely person.

I was incredibly depressed at the time, and had just dropped out of college the year prior due to ever-increasing anxiety and an inability to function in public - she was the only person I had ever felt genuinely comfortable talking to and I was completely fascinated by her - I looked forward to waking up every day just because I enjoyed her company. We'd stay up all night talking and watching TV shows, and I had genuinely started to fall for her.

Then one night she says goodnight & we'll talk tomorrow like normal, and I headed off to bed. The next day she didn't come online. A few days went by and I hadn't heard from her at all, and I started to get really worried. I started checking the news & obituaries in her town, but found nothing. I went a little bit mental at this point, and couldn't eat or sleep properly for weeks on end - I had no idea what the f**k was going on - I genuinely thought I might have completely made the whole thing up, and that I was seriously mentally unwell. I thought of her and what could have possibly happened every single day - the anxiety and stress this caused me actually made me physically & mentally ill. This went on for months and I got worse, and worse - eventually leading to a full blown nervous breakdown.

Not going to go into details on that, but eventually I became functional again, and a few months down the line I decided to look into her a little further to see if I could figure out what had happened and get some closure - I came across a girl on a social media site whose pictures she had stolen and from there I began to unravel everything.

I am actually doing fairly well now and I feel a lot healthier than I have in a long, long time. It's weird, but I still think of her from time to time, and despite knowing full well it was either a guy, or someone entirely different to the pictures, I still get quite sad knowing I'll never get to talk to them again. And despite it really f*****g me up for a long time, I'm better for it. I just hope they're doing okay, too.

My 72-year-old great aunt has a profile on Plenty of Fish posing as a 72-year-old male so she can scope out her competition.