If you’re reading this book, you probably already know what a catfish is. But for those of you who are new to the whole concept (in which case—Hi! Nice to meet you!), here’s the UrbanDictionary.com definition:
A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not, using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.
Maybe it’s easiest to define catfish with a good story.
Let’s start with Manti Te’o, a promising linebacker at the University of Notre Dame. For nearly a year, starting in 2011, he was in an online relationship with a pretty Stanford student named Lennay Kekua, who had befriended him through Facebook and Twitter. They had never met in person—after all, they lived halfway across the country from each other—but they spoke on the phone several times a day, so often that Te’o considered Lennay his girlfriend.
In the summer of 2012, Lennay called to tell Te’o that she’d been in a car accident, and as a result of her hospitalization, the doctors had discovered that she had undiagnosed leukemia. Despite bone marrow transplants, by mid-September Lennay was dead. A few days after getting this news, Te’o went out and scored a triumphant victory against Notre Dame rival Michigan State. Afterward, he told the sports media that Lennay’s tragically premature death had inspired him to win. It made a great story—until the media did some digging and discovered that Lennay didn’t exist, except as a Twitter and Facebook profile. There was no Stanford student, no car accident, no tragic battle with cancer. Instead, “Lennay” was a twenty-two-year-old boy named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo who’d been deceiving Manti all along.
It was a textbook catfishing case, and the mainstream media went nuts for it, with coverage everywhere from ESPN to Vanity Fair. You would have thought Te’o was the first person who had ever been duped in that way. But the truth is that since some caveman told the very first lie thousands of years ago, people have been pretending to be someone they’re not, frequently in the name of romance. (Look at the themes of many Shakespeare plays and you’ll see that identity deception has been a part of our culture for a while.) The difference today is that the Internet has made this much, much, much easier. Now, if you want to be a blond fashion model or a racecar driver or a Stanford student with a winning smile, you can be: All you need to do is find a photo, put up a Facebook page, and voila.
And in fact, that’s exactly what’s happening, over and over, in America and around the world. Catfish stories like Te’o’s (and my own) are popping up with increasing frequency, and not just on my TV show. Consider this: Facebook admits that a mind-boggling 83 million Facebook profiles—8.7 percent of all profiles—are fakes or dupes. That’s a lot of people who don’t actually exist, conducting online relationships as if they are real people. This culture of deceptive online identity has grown so much that even social media profiles that are legitimate are increasingly riddled with lies.
In other words, catfishing has become so ingrained in modern life that many people do it unconsciously, in small but significant ways.
Even among those who set out to intentionally create a fake new identity, not all catfish are the same. Catfish tend to fall into a number of different categories, from fairly benign to incredibly malevolent.
Let’s break them down, shall we?
If you didn’t learn the story of Cyrano de Bergerac in English lit—or see the movie Roxanne—here’s a quick recap: Seventeenth-century poet with alarmingly large nose who believes he is unworthy of love agrees to help his handsome friend woo the beautiful Roxanne, whom Cyrano is also in love with, by writing her beautiful love letters for him. The Cyrano catfish takes that classic story and gives it a digital twist: Instead of love letters, it’s Facebook messages, and instead of a handsome friend as a stand-in, it’s a fake profile.
Of all the catfish I’ve encountered, these are by far the most common: people who seek, or unintentionally find, love under false pretenses. Cyrano catfish are generally insecure about themselves—their looks, their lives, their families, their jobs—and so they create fake profiles for the people they wish they were. And as those fake people, they have online romances.
Some of these catfish set out—as Cyrano did, and as Ronaiah Tuiasosopo also did—intending to fool someone specific. But they do so because they want to connect with another person. Others stumble into relationships accidentally. They don’t set out to deceive someone in the pursuit of romance. Instead, they create their fake social media profiles as a coping mechanism for their feelings of isolation and loneliness, their insecurity and fear. In other words, they’re trying to escape their problems via an idealized version of themselves. They think that under this new, more attractive guise, they will be appreciated for who they “really are” rather than being judged for how they look, or where they live, or the size of their bank account. They just want to be liked. Unfortunately, those fake profiles engage with real people. And the next thing you know, they are involved in a deceptive online relationship.
Take, for example, the case of James (episode 110), a guy who decided to reinvent himself in order to escape a less-than-exciting life and a criminal charge that had been dropped but was still associated with his name online. His Internet alter ego was Ja’Mari, a model and inspirational speaker with five thousand followers. Ja’Mari was who James felt he could be, if only he didn’t have all his baggage. As Ja’Mari, James connected with Rico, a gay National Guard member, and what started as a friendship snowballed into a serious online relationship. Although James hadn’t created Ja’Mari in order to ensnare Rico, when Rico found out about the deception, he was still hurt.
Cyrano catfish like James often know that what they are doing isn’t exactly kosher. But that doesn’t stop them from doing it. They need it. It gives them happiness, some sort of positive reinforcement, and the distraction from their lives that they crave.
The revenge catfish is a different kind of beast. This is someone who sets up a fake profile not because they are looking to genuinely connect with a new person, but because they want to get back at someone they already know. The intention from the get-go is to deceive and hurt somebody.
A good (if complicated) example is the story of Mhissy (episode 104). Mhissy had a brief relationship with a girl named Jasmine. After Jasmine ended the relationship, Mhissy went on to date an ex-boyfriend of Jasmine’s. When Jasmine, who was now pregnant, contacted her ex-boyfriend to request a paternity test, Mhissy, who was still pissed at Jasmine, got mad. (Like I said: complicated.) Instead of talking to Jasmine about it, Mhissy set up a fake profile of a handsome man and started flirting with Jasmine with the intention of distracting her from her ex-boyfriend and messing with her mind. It worked, for a crazy long time.
In rare cases, a catfish can set up a profile with the specific purpose of trying to help someone. I’ve only come across a few, but here’s a good example:
Gladys (episode 201) had been best friends with Cassie since grade school. When Cassie’s father was murdered, her life began a downward spiral—she began drinking heavily, doing drugs, and sleeping around. Gladys, desperate to stop Cassie’s self-destructive behavior, created a fake profile of a handsome guy and friended Cassie. Over the course of two years, Cassie’s new online boyfriend—and eventual fiancé—“Steve,” helped build up her self-esteem and pull her out of the darkness. Gladys even enlisted her male cousin to be the voice of the fake boyfriend (going so far as to have phone sex with Cassie).
Of course, Cassie wasn’t exactly thrilled to learn that she’d been lied to—the phone sex in particular was pretty horrifying to her—but she at least understood that Gladys had undertaken this whole deception with the best intentions.
Another fascinating benevolent catfish story that I investigated (but that never aired) started with a girl who couldn’t get her deadbeat ex to pay his child support. Instead, she reached out to his even more recent ex-girlfriend for help, and the two of them collaborated to form a third, fake girl with the intention of using her to convince him to pay child support. (Yes, I know that some of these stories are convoluted. That’s what real life is like.) Together, they made the girl that they knew he’d think was perfect—and it worked! She flirted with him, got him to talk about his daughter, told him she hoped he was “really supportive” of her, and otherwise massaged him into believing that the right thing to do was become a more financially responsible guy.
It all worked beautifully until he figured out that the girl in the pictures was actually another girl—at which point the two girls who started it all had to reach out to that girl, and got her to participate in the ruse! Next thing you know, girl number three was video-chatting with the deadbeat dad as the fake girlfriend, too.
Swindling catfish are the ones that I personally have the hardest time relating to. For these catfish the exchange that takes place with their victim isn’t for affection or attention, but for their livelihood. The swindling catfish’s goal is to scam people for cash, or more.
This kind of stuff happens every day online (in fact, these types of swindles pre-date the Internet), and stories about it are becoming increasingly common. The most frequent story you’ll hear is about men who get involved online with “women” from foreign countries and send cash to them for plane tickets or moving expenses, only to get stood up. Perhaps the most widely known case—featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine last year—involved a world-renowned particle physicist who got involved with a Czech “bikini model” on an online dating site and flew to Bolivia to meet her. She had allegedly just left for a modeling job in Argentina, but asked him to bring her the suitcase she’d left behind. The suitcase was full of drugs, and the physicist was subsequently arrested. He has spent the past few years rotting in jail in Argentina.
Most of the catfish I encountered on the first two seasons of the show were people who believed that a false online personality was the best way to sort through some emotional confusion or an identity crisis they were having, rather than just trying to steal from others. But in season three, I encountered more of these Swindling catfish, people who created false identities with the intention of deception for their own material or financial gain. If you’re going to get hooked, this is the worst kind of person to have on the other end.
Then there are the all-too-common impersonating catfish, who pretend to be celebrities online. Even I’ve been a victim of this scam: Do a search for my name on Facebook and you’ll come across more than thirty profiles claiming to be Nev Schulman, including a profile just for my chest hair. (Yes, it’s exceptionally lush, but come on.) One of these profiles had 4,500 followers before it was shut down; the catfish who ran it was chatting with his “friends” every day as me.
Sometimes these impersonators are a type of Cyrano catfish (think Keyonnah and Bow Wow in episode 214), but usually they are caught up in the currency of having “fans,” and they derive a strange emotional satisfaction from driving up their numbers, despite the fact that the whole thing has nothing to do with them.
The truth is, it’s not just celebrities who are impersonated. Think about all those Facebook friends you have that you’ve never met. They have access to all of your information. They could be on your profile right now, downloading your photos and creating another you somewhere else in order to catfish someone. It’s scary how easy it is to impersonate someone and how casually a catfish can damage the reputation of the person they’re pretending to be.
Which brings me to…
The fact is, there are catfish everywhere you go on the Internet.
Anyone who has dated online has surely encountered profiles that use photoshopped or altogether false pictures and contain fudged information. That cute doctor you chatted with for weeks but never actually met? The hot exotic dancer who bailed on you three times because she had to work? There’s a fair chance they were catfish.
Looking out at the Internet landscape, it’s clear that false identities, from the mild prevarication to the jaw-dropping lie, have come to pervade every part of online life. A lot of people think that the catfish phenomenon is just a popular scam, just a digital deception. But in my experience, the issue of catfishing is so much deeper and more complex than that. It’s the most extreme symptom of a trend in society away from the honesty and confidence that a face-to-face relationship demands and toward the isolation and cowardice of online connections. It’s about the insecurity at the center of online life. About the fear of a real life lived in public that drives people to decide that it’s better to pretend to be someone else entirely. About the way we all—catfish or not—curate ourselves online to be “better” or more “interesting” than we really are, presenting images and ideas that don’t align with our real selves.
The rise of false online identities has opened up the bigger question of how social media is shaping both our romantic relationships and the way we function in our day-to-day lives. What is it about social media that compels us to lie? What happens when online relationships are based on small fictions or big deceptions; when everyone, intentionally or not, is participating in a culture of false identity? In a world where human interaction takes place through a screen, how do we learn to be honest and to trust that others are, as well?