In case you’re not familiar with the term, “Catfishing” is when someone online misrepresents themselves, sometimes going as far as pretending to be someone completely fake. It could be as simple as fibbing on their physical attributes or age, to pretending to be a completely different person.

Christopher Brignell - ThinkStock
Christopher Brignell - ThinkStock
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This past weekend, I got Catfished.

I received a message on an online dating site from someone I hadn’t talked to before. It turned into a perfectly pleasant conversation that went on for about two hours.

The strange part was when, in the middle of the conversation, the other person mysteriously disappeared.

I’d been blocked.

I couldn’t figure out why. The conversation didn’t bring up any controversial or potentially offensive topics, so I was a bit perplexed as to why I’d been blocked.

It just so happens that I have the same dating app on a different device that I’d used a long time ago, so it has an old profile on it. I decided to go on from my other device to see if the same profile showed up from a different device.

It did.

This is where I started to get suspicious. This particular app shows how far away the person you’re speaking to is, the distance that showed up didn’t jive at all with where this person claimed to live.

So I started a conversation to try to mine for basic information. This is where I realized that I was being had.

Name, age, location, job, even the picture, were all different than what I’d been told previously.

With no desire to drag it out, I called the perpetrator out that I knew that I was being had.

It turns out that it was someone that I went on a date with once.

The reason given to me for the fake was, “I wanted to see if you’d be more interested in the fake person than you apparently are in me”.

There were many ways that I could have responded. I could have said any number of not so kind things, but I took the high road. I simply said, “we won’t be meeting up again, please delete my number from your phone”, and then I hit the “block” button.

At first I was annoyed by having my time wasted and being the target of an immature game. But in the end, it was just disappointing. Disappointing that online dating has come to this. That you never truly know if the person on the other side of the computer is real or not until you actually meet up.

And it just goes to show, be careful what you put out there, you never really know who’s on the other side.

Have you ever been “Catfished”? Tell us what happened in the comments section!

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