Friday, August 22, 2014

Curiosity Killed The Catfish


Ever heard of Catfishing?
It's something we online daters have keep an eye out for.
According to urbandictionary.com, catfishing is:
The phenomenon of internet predators that fabricate online identities and entire social circles to trick people into emotional/romantic relationships.

Well ladies and gentlemen, I caught myself a catfish! And by caught, I don't mean I was in an emotional/romantic relationship with a fake person. I mean I caught a person red-handed, pretending to be someone they aren't. We'll call him.....Darius, because guess what...THAT ISN'T HIS REAL NAME!

About two months ago I went through this kick where I'd look at the man catalog and message a person a day. Darius was one of the people that I messaged, even though his profile was very lack-luster. The thing that made me message him was that one of his two pictures was of his buff arms. It would be an understatement to say that I LOVE buff arms.
I had forgotten that I messaged him until a week ago when he replied to my message and said, "Hey u! Sorry it took me a minute to reply. How r u?"
Red Flag Moment: Please spell out simple words like, "you" and, "are".
After a snarky response of, "A minute....a month...whose really keeping track?", we emailed back and fourth for a few hours. Then he sent me his cell-phone number and asked me to text him.
We text for a couple of days, which basically means I grilled him with a ton of questions, because my curiosity knows no bounds. Still though, you have to take their answers with a grain of salt, because they could say anything, and I wouldn't know the difference.

TANGENT: There is a very fine line between cautious curiosity & creeper. I feel like when you're online "dating"  you are constantly having to toe that line. Because I'm always worried that the person on the other side of the screen isn't really who they say they are, I am always in "Find out about them" mode. Which often means googling the tiny bits of info they give me and hoping they return a result. The perverted Jew-to my utter surprise-was exactly who he said he was...I looked him up. That's when you start to feel creepy. Because now...instead of going through the "get to know you" process WITH someone, you already know things about them. BUT you only feel bad if they turn out to really be who they say they are. But you can never tell, until you do that "research".
We went a couple of days without corresponding at all, which was fine with me. I decided that if he wanted to contact me he could, but I wasn't going to be the one making the effort.
Last night he text me, and after getting into our conversation, I decided to do some of my "cautious curiosity research".
Taking the info provided by the dating site, and the info he told me about where he worked, and what his name is; I did a google search. His job seemed to me like something that would have a news article or two written about it. What I was hoping to find was something that would verify what he was telling me.
The whole time I'm doing this "research", I was still texting him, and asking him questions; getting more details that I can enter into my search.

In doing my research I found out he isn't who he says he is. The names, and dates, and stories he told don't correspond with the info I found online.
The pictures I found of him from the news articles look like the two pictures from his profile, expect the profile pictures are like 10 years old.


 I'm pretty proud of myself for being such a sleuth! I can't imagine our "friendship" would have gone any further anyway...but now I can totally call him out on being a catfish!
I want to say to him "So If you're Darius....who is (insert his REAL name here)."

4 comments:

  1. It's a good thing you are so inquisitive. I am dying to know what you say to confront him. You should have been a detective. It is so creepy to me that people would do that so much that there is an actual name for it. :-(

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  2. Hello! This is me, commenting on your blog! CATFISHING!

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  3. Oops, this is Mellissa Lyle, not Kurt, haha!

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