People Share Their Craziest, Borderline-Dangerous Catfish Stories

From Redditor /u/DwarfStacker:

To start, I want to say... I am very active and try to eat healthy-ish, and being very active (hike, bike, climb or some other active outside thing almost everyday of the week) is very important to me.

I met this girl on the Tinders or some site and she looked super cute - a little curvy in all the right ways, incredible skin, and these crazy green eyes. We chatted for a while and agreed to meet at a local bar.

The girl who met me was not that girl. She was about 275 lbs, 5'5"-5'6" ish, horrible skin that look like she wiped her face off with the greasy bottom of a WacArnolds bag, and these sullen dark brown eyes. Clearly the pictures were of her to some degree because I could see her in the pictures.

After we said our hello's and got a drink there was a long awkward silence. Nothing to talk about. We had talked about how she also enjoyed being active outside and everything, but I did not get that impression from our initial conversation. I decided to jump right in, and asked if she sometimes wore colored contacts, to which she replied no, she just liked the way it made her look.

Some more less-than-subtle probing from me (I was annoyed that I clearly had been deceived onto a date), and she admitted she was a graphic designer, and quite talented with Photoshop. She basically Photoshopped herself into a 5'9", 165 lbs, green-eyed, fair-skinned bombshell.

She admitted she had Photoshopped herself to get dates. I was dumbfounded. No, I probably would not have gone out with her if she had been real, but I know there are guys that would have, who maybe didn't care about the lifestyle things I care about. But the fact that she had intentionally deceived me made me despise her. She then had the audacity to claim that I was an assh*le because I never "gave her a real shot."

From Redditor /u/RamsesThePigeon: 

Back when AIM was all the rage, I started exchanging messages with a young woman. She described herself as being petite, attractive, and physically active, and the pictures that she sent seemed to confirm those claims. For a while, we discussed standard (boring) teenage topics... but eventually, our conversations took a turn for the bizarre.

One evening as we were talking, she told me a story about how she and her twin sister had "switched boyfriends" in the middle of the night. They were caught, and neither boy was particularly pleased about the situation, so in order to make it up them, the girls agreed to have a foursome. The tale struck me as being more than a little bit odd, but I could see no reason for someone to lie about it, so I went right on believing.

Things got stranger from there.

As the months progressed, I was treated to a dramatic saga of epic proportions. First, the girl's twin sister was killed in a car crash that also ended her father's life. Not long after, her mother was killed in an accident (which was strongly implied as having been a suicide).

The girl herself - being under eighteen - was sent to live with her uncle, who forced her to work at a [gentlemen's] club in order to pay the rent. (When I asked how she, a sixteen-year-old girl, was allowed to work there, she told me that "the fire marshal said it was okay.")

That was about the time that the alarm bells in my head drowned out my sense of trust. I went back and reappraised everything that she had told me, and I noticed some rather glaring inconsistencies. After coming to terms with the fact that I'd been blatantly lied to for months, I started calling out every potential untruth that I spotted, and I gave the girl an ultimatum: unless she came clean about who she was, I would cut off contact with her entirely.

She protested at first, going through such acts as being angry that I didn't believe her, and depressed because her "only real friend" had stopped trusting her word. Still, I stayed adamant, and eventually, she agreed to let me see her on webcam.

It turned out that she was an impressively overweight girl who bore absolutely no resemblance to the pictures that she had sent me. Her stories - or so she claimed - were all invented to "keep me interested," because (according to her) I wouldn't have kept talking to her if I'd known who she really was.

Truth be told, she was probably right. Still, I made an effort to keep conversing with her after that, and to learn who she really was... but I never felt like I could trust anything that she said, and eventually, we just stopped talking entirely.

From Redditor /u/Thegauloise: 

When I was 18, I signed up for a dating site pretending to be a 15-year-old girl (the thought was just pranking a friend); the number of messages I got from creepy old dudes was amazing! (I'm a man BTW.) There was this one guy, he was about 54 years old and a construction worker, who was VERY graphic in his first message, so I got curious and started talking to him, he was such an assh*le.

I told him I (my persona) lied about my age and I'm actually 13 years old, [but] he didn't mind. I was disgusted by this guy, but curious, so I kept it going and he wanted to meet with me. So I said sure let's meet, I would send him all over the country for a "date" with me, and I told him to buy all these ridiculous things like ballerina outfits, four dozen bananas (told him I wanted to have a banana milkshake party with some friends). I stopped doing this after like three or four days.

To be perfectly honest this was a learning experience for me too, I didn't know how creepy and f*cked up guys could be on dating sites and in general, I have way more respect and empathy for women having to put up with this sh*t since then.

From Redditor /u/Not_My_Usual_Acount: 

I was single and on Tinder. I saw my sister's boyfriend on there and thought, what the f*ck is this? I made a fake profile to catfish him and talked to him for a bit - it was obviously him, and I got his number. Showed it to my sister and she broke up with him.

From Redditor /u/lineman77: 

A girl on Tinder, who was extremely attractive, found my Snapchat and started asking for nudes. Even went first with some teasing pictures. It wasn't difficult to figure out the girl in the pictures was not the girl sending me pictures.

But, I went with it and the girl ended up being pretty good looking as well so I wasn't upset about it. Never went beyond Snapchat though.

From Redditor /u/milesfortuneteller: 

This is actually really horrible and I still feel guilty to this day. In grade eight, my best friend, Sara, and I decided to make a fake MSN profile and add another friend of ours, Tim. We called ourselves "Brett" and chatted with Tim day after day, claiming to be Sara's acquaintance from the neighboring town.

We got him to confess a ton of things, like his crush on a friend of ours and that he found my mom hot. After a month we realized we went way too far and shut it down. He would talk to us about Brett and that he missed having a guy to chat with. We felt horrible and promised we'd never speak of it again.

Sara ended up having her wedding in this neighboring town about five years later, and Tim told me he couldn't wait to finally meet Brett in person. I'm worried for the day karma comes for us.