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

I didn't realize it at the time but looking back on it, I think my 'runescape girlfriend' who I mined a f**kton of ore for back in the day (RSC) wasn't a girl at all.

I was catfished while I was in high school- the whole event went on for about 3 years, so I’ll do my best to condense the story.

It started when my family moved overseas to Japan (my dad was in the Air Force). Not having many friends at first I turned to the internet and talking to people online. There was this super sketchy webcam chat room that a friend from where I lived previously had introduced me to. It was called Stickam, I believe, and every day after school I would log on, turn my webcam on, and just wait for people to talk to me. A lot of creeps, but I was 16 and liked the attention.

I met this guy named Adam and he had just sent me a chat. We would talk every day! Eventually we ditched talking on Stickam and switched to Skype and AIM messenger. We were friends on MySpace and I would talk to him every single day. We became really good friends and he would tell me that he loved me. I would always have my webcam on and he would just be talking, but no webcam. He claimed his mom took it away from him because she found out he was talking to strangers on the internet.

Adam ended up having a series of really unfortunate, even tragic, things happen to him. He got Leukemia, his mom was k**led in a terrible accident, and his step father lost everything due to all of the overwhelming medical bills. It was so sad and I felt like I was the only good thing left in his life.

A year later my family and I left Japan and moved back to the United States. Adam and I stay in touch but it was definitely less than when I lived in Japan. We had several arguments where I would ask him to send me photos or webcam and he would always have an excuse. My friends started calling me out and telling me how he wasn’t real- but I was in a bit of denial.

During my senior year of high school I was applying to colleges and there was one that I really wanted to go to and it was in the state where he lived. What a great coincidence! I finally was going to be able to meet him! I made plans to travel there to visit the college, but also made plans to meet him. He was fully on board and we agreed on a day and said that once I was there we would agree on a time and place. The week I was visiting he completely ghosted me and I didn’t hear from him for about 3 weeks. I was so disappointed, but at this point angry.

He made contact and apologized, saying he got really sick and was hospitalized. I moved past it but started to distance myself. I ended up getting accepted to that university and now we were going to be literally in the same county. So once I moved and got settled into college I told him that I wanted to meet once and for all. I then got a very long and angry text message from his step dad saying to not come near Adam or I would be arrested. I decided to back off- not really believing any of it but the situation was getting really weird and I had a bad feeling.

That Christmas break I was back home with my sister watching the MTV show Catfish. One of their techniques to find fake profiles is to reverse google search images to see where else that image is on the internet. I did just that with his MySpace profile picture and found the profile of the real person. I messaged him laying everything out on the table, and his response was “for someone as smart as you I’m really surprised it took you this long to figure it out.”

I was so relieved to finally know the truth and have actual evidence! I knew he was lying to me for a really long time but I could never prove it and he always denied it. A few weeks later he ended up asking me if we could talk on skype for real. He said he wanted me to actually see him and know who he was. I agreed.

We Skyped for about 20 minutes. He was my age, just a little socially awkward and overweight. I asked about what was true and what was false- he seemed to be honest and admitted what he lied about, which were small things. He claims that his mother really did d** and he really did have leukemia. At the end he asked if we could still be friends, and I thanked him for finally coming clean, but said that we couldn’t be friends. He said that he never thought we would get so close and his little lie in the beginning turned into a huge lie that he couldn’t get himself out of- so he just kept going along with it.

For the next year he would send me a message on my birthday and holidays, I didn’t respond so the messages stopped.

I still think about Adam every now and then, and I hope he’s doing okay.

I call this “My D**d Girlfriend” story.

Matched on OKCupid and she was super cute. We started messaging and I was stoked to meet her. Unfortunately she was out of town for a couple of weeks for work. Fine, I’m not in a rush. We start talking on the phone all the time. Texting. Voicemails. It was great. She sent me random pics of her. All seemed normal.

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m pushing to meet. She finally comes clean that she went out of town not for work but that she has breast cancer and was getting treatment for it and wasn’t sure how to tell me. Whatevs! That’s okay! Hope it’s going well! I totally dig our conversations and she’s cute so I’ll let it go.

I had made it clear that I wasn’t looking to date anyone with kids, which she didn’t have. She did have a niece and mentioned that one thing she really liked about me was that I knew ASL because her niece was deaf and she was learning it too. Cool. Common interest.

Christmas comes and goes and we still haven’t met. It’s been about a month and every excuse made *just* enough sense that I believed her. Traveling to visit family. Traveling for Christmas. Busy with work. Put together...and I’m a d*****s for believing her...but individually it made sense.

Finally my friend starts to question things. I dig into the pictures and the file names are weird. Like when you just pull them off Facebook. Flash forward and I call her out and she finally admits that the pics were of her 25yo cousin, not pics of her (she was 32yo). Also, not her niece...it’s her daughter. The breast cancer? Well, I never found out the truth in that.

Anyway, I tell her that I’m out because how can I trust anything if these are the lies she’s telling me. I wish her a happy life and move on. About 4 months later, I get an email from her “sister” saying that she had passed away and that she regretted lying to me and really loved me and wished she could have been with me and her sister thought I’d want to know that she had d**d.

What. The. Actual. F**k.

So, I explain that I’d love to meet the daughter because I really cared for her mom (I didn’t...I just wanted her to come clean!). At the first hint of an excuse, I called her out and said, “I think this is so-and-so and you’re just trying to stay in contact with me. Don’t ever email me again.” Haven’t heard anything since.

TL;DR - Woman uses fake pics and lies about having a kid and fakes her own death to stay in contact with me after I call it off.

I have a friend that ended up on the MTV show Catfish. He had moved to a new area and was using Plenty of Fish to meet girls. He met one and they started to talk all the time, but she didn't want to meet up with him. They would video chat and she would always kind of hide her face a certain way, same with any photos.

One day she messaged him and asked if they could finally meet in person but on the show Catfish. He said yes, figured to hell with it might as well take a chance to be on TV. The two hosts (Nev and Max?) flew down and met up with him. He said they were really cool and they partied a bit and had fun. They made up a backstory for him, on the show they had him working at a butcher shop. He thought it was hilarious because he had never been a butcher in his life.

Anyways the day they met she revealed to him that she was transgender, previously a man. That part of the show was real, he met her for the first time on camera and had no idea that was the case. He was calm and nice about it, basically just wanted to know why she didn't just come out and tell him that, that it wasn't really his thing. He said being on the show was a cool experience though, made a little money.

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with a very good-looking guy on a dating app. He would make plans with me, but then have to cancel because something would come up with his kid. One day, I saw a pic of him on Pinterest. Turns out the 'very good looking guy' lived in a different state with his wife, running a successful blog (hence the easy access to his pics). I confronted the guy on the app about it, and he said he'd joined to keep an eye on his ex-wife and found me in the process. He said his goal wasn't to catfish me, but he'd already put himself in this situation with the fake account. His loss.

This wasn't cat-fishing in a dating way, but a different form.
We got a new puppy a few weeks ago. My fiance had been bothering me to get one for a while, and when she found a nice-looking labradoodle in a Facebook group for a decent price, I just said let's go get her tomorrow.

It was a little strange, because the person who was the Facebook poster gave a number for somebody who lived in one town, but wanted us to meet her niece in another place on the other side of town because the main guy was delivering puppies somewhere else. Still a little weird, but we met the niece at a mall, the dog seemed great so we got her.

A few days later, we discovered she had fleas, so my fiance texted the original guy, no response, even with a few more texts. I started Googling the name of the original poster and looked at her profile (something I should have done in the first place), and realized it was a totally fake profile. In the Google search, we found a post warning about a guy in Rochester who ran puppy mills and would use fake names, including the original posters' name. I found the guy's real name and everything and wanted to go to the Humane Society, although we didn't really have a specific complaint.
My fiance didn't want to because the warning post said the guy would harass people and such. She was devastated that our puppy was from a mill, I was just really mad at myself for not doing any bit of back research. Luckily the pup is turning out to be great, so no harm done.

TL:DR: We got catfished by a puppy mill.

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.

One of my close friends in high school catfished someone. She’d been over at my house and borrowed my laptop. After she left, I went online and saw she’d left a Tumblr account logged in, but it clearly wasn’t for herself.

After a quick scroll through her account, I found she was pretending to be a French guy (we’re American) and she was using one of our classmates' photos. I immediately told the rest of our friend group what was going on so we could try to figure out what to do. We ended up reading through some of her messages and learned she had a deep relationship with a girl who lived across the country.

This girl knew NOTHING about who my friend really was. We felt awful. For weeks, we debated telling this girl the truth or even confronting our friend about what she was doing. In the end, we were worried about our friend’s mental health and didn’t want to rock the boat. So we did nothing. I kept an eye on the account for a while, and she deactivated it about a year later. Our friendship fell apart for other reasons not long after. Just a strange situation from start to finish.

Not me, but my best friend. She was (to put it lightly) an average looking, dark skinned, chubby girl, who was usually dressed in traditional (indian) clothes. When we were 15-16, Yahoo Chatrooms were all the rage and she started talking to a guy from our city. Now I too used to chat with guys there but never got too serious with it and the conversations didn't last more than a day. Soon I got over the craze but she didn't. She kept chatting with this guy and even sent him her photos. Only...the photos she sent were of some other girl she had randomly added on Orkut, who was fairer, slimmer and dressed differently (shorts, t-shirts, skinny jeans etc).

She also lied about her age, what she did for a living and where she lived. She told him she lived in another country and was visiting India to attend a family wedding. He asked her to meet and she agreed, and I still don't understand how she thought it would be okay. That day, I was at her place while she got ready for her "classes". She put on an extra fancy set of clothes (Indian churidar kurta), put on jewellery, makeup etc. I asked her why she was so fancily dressed and she just brushed off the question. she left for her classes and I was back home when an hour later, I got a call from her asking me to come to her home (in between sobs). I ran over and she confessed she had been to meet the chatroom guy. She recounted that once she reached the meeting spot and messaged the guy, someone walked by, looking at her from top to bottom. This is how her text conversation with the guy went..

Guy: What color are you wearing?

Friend: (color she was wearing the day)

Guy: You should go home. I cannot meet you.

Friend: Why? What happened?

Guy: Go home, take a look in the mirror and you will know why.

Well, I was super mad at the guy for implying my friend was ugly. I asked my friend to text him that the person he saw was her friend aka me, and how he was so shallow and she was only testing him before actually meeting him. And now she will never meet him because he is not a nice guy etc. He felt bad I guess and apologized but she never spoke to him again.
Now that I think of it, the guy was totally justified for refusing to meet her because my friend was infact a liar (she was a compulsive liar and a messed up person due to a bad, mildly a*****e childhood) and catfished him. At the time I was being defensive about my friend but I understand his side too.

My friend eventually lost the weight, groomed herself and became quite the bombshell. She is however, now happily married and a devoted wife, so it all ended well I guess.

One of my now very close friends pretended to be a woman in World of Warcraft. He joined my guild with his partner, who roped him into the whole "lets pretend to be girls" idea (we like to tease him by saying it was his idea the whole time). After a while, they broke up and his partner left the guild in a rather dramatic way.

After a few days, I get a message saying he needs to tell me something. He admits to being a guy. None of us were incredibly surprised, or really bothered for that matter. In fact, it was kinda hilarious and it meant that now he could finally talk with us in discord. It took a while to be able to refer to him as his real name, though. Still like to bring it up and lightly bully him for it, it's great fun.

Back in 2005, when I was about 19, I (male) met a woman online on IRC, on a channel where people used to play Uno a lot. She was from Louisiana (I'm from Eastern Europe), and she was about 15 years older than me. We hit it off.

Her name was Amanda, she was blonde and very pretty, but she was in a pretty bad way in life. She was living with her elderly mother, mostly off welfare and occasional part time jobs. They were mostly broke and when they did get money, her in-and-out-of-jail d**dbeat brother would use it for d***s.

I spent many nights talking to Amanda; we were in love. We were very, very compatible. I was going through university and we were dreaming of and planning to meet up in the future, get married, and possibly adopt children (since she was/would be too old to have them by then). We talked daily, sometimes over the phone but mostly over text. We played games, we watched movies together, etc. For Christmas she sent me a package with a few bits and pieces that I thought was sweet, and also with one of her worn t-shirts, that still smelled like her perfume.

Every now and then, Amanda would drop off the grid. She'd vanish for about ~a day, and I'd worry (since the area where she lived was supposed to be pretty unsafe), and I'd call her, and she would eventually answer and say that her phone was d**d, or her car's battery had d**d, or she had to go bail her brother out of jail, or whatever. Ok, no big deal, it didn't happen too often anyway.

Then, one time, she disappeared for a day. Then for another day. I tried calling her phone over and over again to no avail. Eventually, I tracked down what would be their landline, and called it. Her mother picked up (I had never spoken to her before but had heard her voice in the background). When I introduced myself, her mother handed the phone to one of Amanda's friends, Danielle. She informed me that Amanda had overd**ed on sleeping pills and alcohol and was in a coma in the hospital. She told me she wasn't likely to ever recover or wake up again.

She also informed me that Amanda was, in fact, not 15 but 20 years older than me. And that she was a homosexual man named Robert. And then a day or so later she called me back to tell me (s)he had passed away. We had been "together" for almost 2 years at that point.

Later, I managed to track down one of her (/his) ex-boyfriends, and I spoke to him for over 2 hours on the phone. He was very nice, and he more or less confirmed to me that about 95% of the things Amanda had told me about herself, her life and so on were, in fact, true. It was really just the name and the gender that was off.

Needless to say, this realization put certain things into perspective: Amanda's almost furious c*****e in the defense of homosexuals, her repeated attempts to break up with me because "it's never going to work out", and her general feeling of hopelessness.

I was chatting up this girl I met online and we were hitting it off pretty good. Finally, after a week of chatting back and forth online we agreed to meet up for drinks. I was excited as Ashley was a little out of my league and genuinely seemed nice. I arrived at the proper place and time and someone walks up to me and introduces themselves as Ashley. I take out my printout and realize, OMG... Ashley is the Dude in the picture, not the girl. WTF dude?

Now, I am a straight man and not into this thing, but Ashley clearly knew I though he was the girl in the picture and led me on. He thought I might want to try "switching teams". I nearly threw up. Needless to say that was the end of that conversation.

TLDR; Gay guy catfished me and thought I might "switch teams" on the spur of the moment.

I talked to this guy, Sean, for months, probably close to a year. Then poof, gone. It sucked but oh well.

Six months later start talking to another guy with the same unusual middle name. He turns out to be Seans ex-boyfriend and about 80% of the stuff I knew about Sean was actually about him. He broke up with Sean six months before and took his phone back and thats why he dissappeared.

TL:DR Met the real-life inspiration for the persona I was catfished with.

I catfished a guy because he is always creeping on (underage) girls on Facebook while he is like 35. He will go trough your friendlist and then he wants to know everything about them, where they live, their phone number etc. I just felt like trolling him at some point so I catfished him for a few months til I got tired of it.

Super honest answer from someone one who has catfished a number of guys throughout the years by pretending to be female.


I don't do it with the intention of trolling or tricking or hurting anyone. The short answer is that I do it because I wish I was a girl and the internet is my only viable outlet for that. If I didn't have that outlet I would f*****g explode.


When I'm online pretending it's the only time in my life that the constant dissonance I feel goes away. Its the only time i feel comfortable in a lifetime of feeling uncomfortable in my body. I'm more confident, outspoken and more real than I ever am in real life. I need to do it.


It could also be an attention thing. As a guy in real life I've always been incredibly attention starved, from early elementary school to now, I've always felt invisible. As a girl, people actually want to talk to me and notice me. It's a shame that it's just online, but again, its my only option.


I should mention I don't pretend to actually have relationships with anyone, I keep it to just friends and try to temper their expectations the best I can. I realize it's deceitful, but it's all I've got. This is one situation where I need to put myself first.

I was talking to a girl I met on Tinder and while I have on my profile that I'm not interested in being anyone's third, she kept talking about the guy she was currently seeing and how hot he was and didn't I want to f**k him with her? I eventually found her facebook and his and his was a real facebook while hers consisted of two really fake looking photos and no actual information. So it became apparent at that point it was the guy just trying to get bi girls to s*xt with him.

A few years later. It wasn't anything serious, just this girl sending me pictures when I was 12-13 and I sent some back. I logged into my old email when I was around 16 and I looked up the email she used, and found out it was this older man who posted up his email asking for girls. He sent me another girls pictures. Piece of s**t.

There was a guy who was friending girls in my high school and sending creepy DMs. A buddy of mine decided to make a fake profile to f**k with him. It took less than 24 hours for 'her' to get a friend request. We spent about 10 minutes chatting before the guy asked for a n*p pic. We were going to call it off then, but I whipped out my n**ple and took a pic (I'm a dude, and a pretty hairy one at that). We sent the pic, and the dude started talking about how hot it was. We stopped after that, mostly because we were laughing too hard.

Oh i was like 15 or so and MySpace was still totally a thing. I met this cute guy and we got along. Now this was about a year or two before the show Catfish was on TV. But long story short I got Catfished for a year. We traded pics but every time we went to video chat his camera was “broken” so I never saw his face live but like (god so cheesy) we played chess/checkers over messenger so I know SOMEONE was on the other side of a computer responding to me. We talked on the phone so much and talked of marriage. Every time he would come to meet me he’d get about halfway then something would happen; home emergency, he got arrested, car broke down, ect.

Then he ghosted me.

Back then I refused to believe I was so dumb to be Catfished and let myself believe someone cared about me like that (rough home life and depression f***s a kid up). Now I realize I was 100% Catfished. If I could find the person that did this to me I wouldn’t yell or scream at them. I would just ask them why they did it and tell them that I hope their life has improved since.

Back in Highschool I used to pretend to be a girl in Counter Strike: Source/ Early CSGO just to get free skins. It started off as a joke to troll people but some of the guys that I would play with REALLY wanted to get to know me. Most knew it was a troll but there are a good amount of guys out there that didn’t question me for being mic-less and took their chances of me being a girl.

At first I told them off the bat I was just some dude they’re flirting with and I eventually wanted to see how far I can take it. I made them pity me by telling them it was my birthday but I was just going to play CS all day since my family was too broke to do something for me. After they bought me skins I would block and report them for s**ual harassment just because. It didn’t last very long but I learned most guys are complete a******s to girls when they’re anonymous.