Have you been CATFISHED?

I'm going to date myself with this story, but here it goes. In 1987 I was stationed at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi and had been working with a man over the phone for a couple of years. I liked him a lot and probably had a little crush on him. I had to go to San Antonio for a meeting he was hosting. The airline lost my luggage, so I borrowed a friend's name tag and headed out to the meeting. When I got there I recognized the man I was crushing on by his voice and was stunned to find that rather than a big manly guy he was a little skinny not-so-manly guy. He didn't recognize me as I was wearing someone else's name tag, so I had a bit of time to observe before I spoke and he started to figure out who I was.

Not necessarily an online thing, but similar issue.

Before I share my story, I want to make two things clear: I am married and intend to stay that way. And NOTHING happened with the guy in the story below.

Years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I ended up spending the night at the guy's house (he was a junior at the same high school) because of really bad, threatening weather. I didn't like him then, so there was NOTHING between us. It was a safety issue.

Flash forward 30 years, and out of the blue the guy contacts me and we begin playing catch up. He comes here to my city, and my husband and I BOTH meet him for dinner. While at dinner, he tells me he is not married -- hasn't been for years, has NO children, has even had a vasectomy so he couldn't have any more children. He is "lonely", wants to find the "love of his life" and confesses that he wanted to date me 30 years ago, and is STILL crushing on me.

A couple years ago, he was in a car accident and suffered a serious injury. He kept telling me that the lawsuit he had was about to settle, and he would be receiving 1.4 million dollars from it. He wanted me to dump my husband (whom he met!), and run off with him to Costa Rica where we would have our "happily ever after" living in the warm sun and drinking margaritas on the beach, blah blah blah. I never agreed to this, I never gave him any idea that I was romantically interested in him (never was, never will be), yet he continued to offer me all sorts of wonderful gifts, and trips, etc., once the lawsuit settled. I found him to be a bit too preoccupied with trying to get me into bed, and started ignoring his texts, emails, etc.

Long story short -- he is currently married (has been for the last 8 years), and has 5 children. The fact that this douche nozzle could deny his CHILDREN absolutely disgusts me! As for the lawsuit and the big settlement? 75,000, and the insurance company is fighting it all the way to court. How do I know all this? His wife called me, after she found his email to me. She told me he has done this before to a variety of women, and has about 3 mistresses currently. Apparently, he has BPD and has relapsed into some fantasy world where he believes he's God's gift to women. What a SICK f*k.

CLARIFICATION: I DID NOT reciprocate those weird emails.

catfish proves how desperate some people are for love

It happened to me on myspace. Photoshopped pictures, goo lighting, angles ect. She had the balls to be upset when I told her she was about 100 pounds heavier than her pictures and she covered up the scars on her face! She even blogged about me for months after.

I was pissed I spent like £500 on the trip up north to see her!

I met my husband 6 years ago online, he was better in person than online

Met my wife on AOL, 19 years ago, when AOL was about all the Internet ordinary people used.

We both represented ourselves as kind, reasonable, normal people...double catfish!

:laugh: ^^ This, only it was 14 yrs ago, and my husband.

When I was in college, I got my chat on and this one person kinda stood out. She was a freshman like me so we just started chatting every night. She was a couple hundred miles away but I had no intention of meeting her ... especially after a week. She really started to turn into a level 60 clinger and started to get pissed off when I didn't log in on time.

So I "reverse catfished" her (i guess). I told her I was actually a married 42 year old dude with two kids. Her response was dead silence. Then I told her I was just kidding. She said she didn't believe me and then logged off forever.

I'm bumping this thread to read the stories.

I have my own "story", but I won't throw anyone under the bus since I actually met him through this site!

A long time ago before it was easy to send pics that were taken, I chatted with a guy who had only sent me one picture. After we chatted for about a year I finally managed to meet him (had to go all the way from Iowa to South Carolina) and he was much older and heavier than he was in the pictures. We met one time and that was all, because he lied to me. I refused to talk to him again.

Currently I am actually dating someone who I met on a dating site. He lives only about an hour away from me though, so we met within a couple of weeks of first communicating. We have been dating for about a month now. So far so good, he seems to be just who he says he is.

Wayyy back in the 90's I emailed/instant messaged with a guy for a few weeks that finally admitted that he'd been using pictures of some Romanian male model instead of his own. It turns out he had dating ads all over the country as both male and female (always very good-looking)...it was sort of his hobby, I guess. He collected and cataloged the responses and had made up names for the "types" of people who responded to him. For instance, there's a certain type of guy out there that writes to women on dating sites in a story form; he called them "fictioners". He said he'd tried using his own photo to find people to talk to and found that people just weren't as responsive as they were to the model's photos. He tried to say that he did it as a student of human behavior, but I think he was just lonely and bored. And a little crazy.

That Catfish show is hard to watch. Nowadays I don't understand why anyone wouldn't check a photo recognition site like tineye to see if the pictures of the person they're talking to are stolen. And Google! I guess they're just so blinded by the thought of being with someone beautiful that they switch their brains off rather than ruin the fantasy. I kinda cringe every time they confront the catfish and it turns out to be an obese person, which is almost always. I guess fat doesn't get much play on the ol' innerweb.