Catfishing

What's a MySpace?

"They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh."

— Vince Pierce, Catfish, the Trope Namer

The internet has shaped the way of life over the years, and that includes romance. People have been getting into relationships thanks to online dating. But there is a darker and tragic side to online dating, one of which is catfishing, the act of deceiving someone online into a relationship using a fictional profile and name and someone else's photo, either into romantic or business relationships.

Here are other reasons for Catfishing:

• The catfish was feeling insecure about themselves and created a fake profile using a highly attractive person's photos.
• Was using the fake profile to distract the intended person from another love interest.
• Catfish wants to use the intended person for something illegal (a romance scam in which they feign interest and then ask for money, to steal money in a con artist scheme, or to trick the mark into giving up their login credentials etc.). This latter variant is also known as catphishing as a combination of the words of "catfishing" and "phishing".

The Trope Namer is from Catfish, but Catfish: The TV Show (made by the same guy, Nev Schulman), made the term more popular and mainstream.

This scheme may turn out to be a Cyberbullying, Driven to Suicide, or Deadly Prank. Comedic examples may involve a "Fawlty Towers" Plot as the catfisher struggles to maintain the persona.

Frequently overlaps with Dating Service Disaster, G.I.R.L., Unsettling Gender-Reveal, and Date My Avatar, though the concept can exist outside of the internet. Also compare 419 Scam, another type of con based on a fake identity. Can cross over with Deadly Prank. And this is not to be confused with The Catfish. It is named after fishermen disguising their fingers as worms to catch the catfish.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• One chapter of Beast Complex has a white tiger pretending to be a zebra on a zebra dating app because white tigers are very rare and he had been unsuccessful dating other tigers and thought he might be able to find a Commonality Connection with another black and white striped animal.
• Non-online example in The Tatami Galaxy. In several episodes, the protagonist has a pen-pal relationship with a girl who seems perfect for him. Over the course of his correspondence, he inflates his own achievements to the point of essentially creating an entirely fictional version of himself for her. As it turns out, the pen-pal didn't exist, and her letters were written by Ozu and Akashi as a prank, though Akashi's involvement hints at her interest in him.

Fan Works

• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing:
  • Huey met Tenderfeet, who claimed he was a Junior Woodchuck like him, on an online forum and Tenderfeet kept asking him for pictures. When he eventually asked for a nude photo, Huey refused, so he sent a photo of him with a tattoo, revealing him as an adult.
  • Mabel met a "boy" online who claimed his name was Norman and that he was her age. When she went to meet "him" in the woods, it turned out to be the Gnome Gang, who assaulted her. It's later revealed that Bill Cipher also helped to set this up.
  • Laverna claimed to be a trans woman and lesbian, but is actually transphobic and groomed people into harassing people they didn't think belonged in the LGBT+ community. Additionally, her daughter Elina makes a post explaining that she was unaccepting of her being trans and, according to the tags, she also committed child murder.
  • Downplayed; Cam actually is a young Israeli intersex trans man with autism as he says he is, but he's a paid psyop for the Israeli government whose job is to stir up arguments on social media to make Palestine supporters look bad.

Film - Live Action

• Badhaai Do: Sumi agrees to meet with a woman on a dating app...only to find out that "Mireil" is a stalkerish man trying to get with lesbians. This event leads her to the police station where the gay Shardul works.
• Catfish: Featured the main lead Nev pursue an online relationship with someone called Megan, but she was someone else called Angela. This is where the name Catfish originated from.
• Cyberbu//y (2011): Samantha makes a fake profile on the website Clicksters, pretending to be a boy named James who has a crush on her best friend, Taylor. She proceeds to use the James profile to start spreading slanderous rumors about her, which is another push toward Taylor being Driven to Suicide. Interestingly, Taylor forgives her.
• Deadpool 2: Deadpool accuses Peter of this, since his application photo looks nothing like him.
• Two examples in Disconnect:
  • Ben gets trolled hard by Jason and Frye who use a fake online account under the name of "Jessica Rhony" to win his trust and reveal intimate details about himself.
  • Cindy, who recently lost her son, gets solace by talking to someone in an online support group chat. This person turns out to be a hacker who lures Cindy onto some website that installs a Trojan on her laptop allowing the hacker to steal her credit card details and social security number in the process.
• Love Hard: The plot of the film is kicked off when Natalie, who is attempting to hook up with someone via online dating, connects with what seems to be a hunky, outdoorsy East Coaster, and decides to fly cross-country to spend Christmas with him. Upon arriving at his home, however, she learns that Josh, the person she was communicating with, is really a nerdy Basement-Dweller, but also that Tag, the man she was attracted to, also lives in town and was childhood friends with Josh, so Natalie and Josh strike a deal in which he will set her up with Tag if she pretends to be his girlfriend to impress his unsuspecting family. It turns out Josh set up the fake online persona with doctored pictures of Tag as an experiment to see if good looks were more attractive than personality, as he doesn't feel confident in finding romance. Natalie eventually convinces Josh to be truer to himself and comes to terms with the hypocrisy in lying about herself to impress Tag, so she makes a public confession that causes a disappointed Tag to dump her and starts a relationship with Josh instead.
• In Searching, Vick's son uses a stock photo of a young woman to get close to Margot on a chat service.
• Sierra Burgess is a Loser: The plot of the film is that, thanks to a prank by Veronica, Sierra ends up catfishing a boy named Jamey, who believes he's texting (and then falling in love with) Veronica herself.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), Rachel's fiancé Randall is revealed to be an undercover G.U.N. agent, and their wedding was merely the culmination of a sting operation designed to catch Sonic. The name of said operation? Operation Catfish. Rachel doesn't take this very well. Subverted in that Randall ended up falling for her for real, and she ultimately forgives him.
• In You and Your Stupid Mate, Jeffrey has cyber-sex with Hot Pants 69, a fellow Sons and Surf fan he met through the fansite he runs. At the protest to stop his favourite character from being killed off, he finally gets to really meet Hot Pants 69, who turns out to be a middle-aged male dwarf in a wheelchair, played by Quentin Kenihan.

Literature

• In After the Revolution, the Heavenly Kingdom uses a group of charismatic young men calling themselves the "Sons of Jacob" to charm dissatisfied teenage girls from their secular neighbor states and lure them into their territory online, much like ISIS in real life. Sasha outright namechecks the trope, saying that Alexander catfished her after she discovers he already has multiple wives, something he never mentioned anything when they were just talking online.
• Animorphs: Jake receives a mushy love letter (well, email) from Cassie, but he quickly realizes it's from his best friend Marco. So, he goes along with it, telling "Cassie" he loves her too, but unfortunately, he's sworn not to go any further into a relationship until Marco gets a girlfriend, knowing it'll get a laugh.
• The Girls Series: In "Girls in Tears", Nadine insists upon going to meet a fellow teenager who writes Xanadu fanfiction about her. It turns out that he's a fifty-year-old man and she is only narrowly saved because Magda and Ellie followed her.
• In Nickel Plated, Kid Detective Nickel catfishes pedophiles, blackmails them with the saved chats, and then sends their info to the FBI anyway.
• The Ink Black Heart: Morehouse, the co-creator of amateur online game "Drek's Game", falls in love over the internet with Paperwhite, another moderator. One of the twists near the end reveals that not only is Paperwhite not a woman, she is a sock puppet of Anomie, who created the game along with Morehouse. Anomie found a sexy photo of an attractive woman and sent it to Morehouse, claiming it to be a picture of "her".
• In Welcome to the NHK, the Hikkikomori protagonist Sato meets a girl online and falls for her, before discovering that "she" was actually a sockpuppet made by his (male) neighbor, in order to teach him a harsh life lesson against wasting all his time in front of a screen.
• Played for Laughs in the Todd Strasser children's book Y 2 K 9. A group of friends on an online chatroom have to join forces as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, only to realize at their first in-person meeting that all of them have lied heavily about their identities. The protagonist, an Uplifted Animal, is shocked at their deception. The others are more shocked that he's a dog.

Live-Action TV

• Catfish: The TV Show, is the Trope Namer, as the show explores the different reasons why people catfish.
• In the second season of American Vandal, the "vandal" turns out to be Grayson Wentz, who copied several pictures and videos from a girl's phone while working in a repair shop, and catfished four other students and a teacher. Once he had enough dirt on them, he blackmailed them into commiting the "turd burglar" crimes.
• Blackish: An episode saw Junior suspect that the girl he's talking to might be a catfish when she shows interest in all the things he likes. Averted, because she was actually real, but he managed to mess it up when he meet her.
• Happens in Black Mirror episode "San Junipero", which is about elderlies who give themselves youthful avatars in a virtual reality environment. This review even draws the connection to Catfish. However, in the case of "San Junipero" it's not the protagonists that get fooled when The Reveal comes around that these youngsters are actually old people but the audience.
• The Boys (2019). A flashback shows that Becca's job involved posing as Homelander during his social media chats. At the time this is presented as a well-meaning deception that leaves Homelander free to save lives, but it's another sign of how Vought Industries is deceiving the public about what superheroes are really up to.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In order to prove to the Vulture's angelic fiancee that he's not the kind man she thinks he is, Jake and Amy create a fake profile on the dating site he uses and shows her the dick pics he sent them through it.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow was talking to a guy called Malcolm online, but he was actually a demon named Moloch whom Willow accidentally released online.
• One episode of Burn Notice begins with Team Westen being hired to chase off a woman's stalker, whom she met through online dating. In short order they find his address is fake. Sam proposes that since the stalker's profile lists "likes fixing up old cars" they could look up if the stalker has an ASE certification, "but that's if anything in this profile is true." The client turns out to be an official at a bank, and the "stalker" actually the leader of a gang of robbers.
• In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the song 'Research Me Obsessively', had Rebecca and Valencia create a fake profile using a classmate of Josh's new girlfriend Anna to look at her private Instagram account by making a follow request, in hopes that Anna would remember them so she can accept the follow request.
• Criminal Minds: An ongoing subplot in season 10 has Callahan's niece Meg and her friend Markayla being catfished by a creepy old man pretending to be a teenage model. Meg tends to be more cautious about it than Markayla, but not cautious enough not to send him pictures or arrange meetings, and she only really gets the sense that something is wrong when "his mom" comes to pick them up for a concert, by which point she's already in the van.
• Community:
  • In episode "The First Chang Dynasty", Britta's job in the heist is to lure Joshua away from the door he is guarding. She does this by pretending to be a teenager girl on Facebook where she asks Joshua if he could meet her outside the building. And he does.
  • In ''Cooperative Polygraphy", Abed is revealed to have created a fake persona on Facebook to seduce his flatmate Annie, because he noticed whenever she was in a relationship, she hummed a lot and made pancakes in the morning for everyone.
• CSI: NY: In "Who's There?", a woman makes a fake Facebook profile to lure her husband into an online affair so she can use it against him in their divorce.
• Degrassi:
  • Degrassi: The Next Generation: In the very first episode, Emma is lured to a hotel by a child predator posing as a 16-year-old high school student.
  • Played for Laughs on Degrassi: Next Class, when Frankie is moping after being dumped by Winston. Her friends Shay and Lola pose as a boy on Instagram to figure out what's wrong with her.
• Desperate Housewives: Lynette catfishes Parker (her son) by pretending to be a fellow teenage girl to get him to open up to her. She's shocked when he develops a serious crush on her made-up persona and lets him down gently. (Tom calls her out on how stupid it was not to think this might backfire.)
• In Euphoria, Jules is catfished by classmate Nate after the latter finds a video of Jules having sex with his dad. He poses as "Tyler" and convinces Jules to send him topless photos of her, which he initially intends to use in order to blackmail her into unspecified "good behavior". After he gets arrested for abusing his girlfriend, he uses the photos to blackmail Jules into implicating someone else in the abuse so that he can beat the rap.
• In the Everything's Gonna Be Okay, after Barb has a fight with her mother, Tellulah hatches a plan to catfish Barb's mom by posing as a prospective suitor, in order to humiliate her.
• In Ghosts (US), Trevor, the ghost who can manipulate objects, uses an iPad to create an online dating profile. Unfortunately, he used the only on-line photo available, his twenty-year-old obituary photo.
• Halt and Catch Fire, one of Cameron's programmers, Lev, is nearly beaten to death by homophobes who lured him in by posing as a gay man on the Community boards.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "The ANTI Social Network," The Gang tries to track down a rude man online; they find that his Facebook page was created by his ex-girlfriend as revenge for posting her nude photos. Then they discover the girlfriend never even met him in real life, and was being catfished in the first place... by a woman named Catfish.
  Mac: What is HAPPENING right now?
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
  • In "Faith", a publisher is killed because he and the editor were catfished into believing in "Erica", an inspirational author and blogger who suffers from ALS. It turned out to have all be a scam by the apparent "foster parents", and the editor killed the publisher rather than have to accept that "Erica" was fake.
  • In "Legacy", a boy creates a fake profile to lure a teenaged girl into an online relationship, as part of an elaborate scheme to take revenge on the boy's mother.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • In "Mean", the bullies posed as the guy Agnes liked on an AIM chatroom just to humiliate her by falsely convincing her he liked her.
  • In "Babes", the mother of a pregnant girl catfished her daughter's (also pregnant) friend and then cyberbullied her with what she'd learned to punish her for ruining her daughter's life and getting her son sent to prison (for killing the father of her daughter's baby).
  • In "Intent", a social media star is raped by a MMA fighter. Turns out he was catfished by a Loony Fan pretending to be the star herself to persuade the wrestler that she was into rape fantasies so that he would do it.
  • In "Catfishing Teacher", as the name implies, the Creepy Gym Coach catfishes young guys who are into the also predatory young female teacher (who, in a twist, gave him the photographs to use) so he can drug and sexually abuse them.
  • It's also standard practice across the episodes for SVU detectives and tech staff to "catfish" pedophiles by pretending to be kids and/or teenagers.
• Mimpi Metropolitan: Episode 60 plays this for laughs. Dian's unattractive online date Niken uses a more-beautiful photo (apparently from years ago) for her Facebook profile picture, likely knowing Dian wouldn't date her if he knows her real face. Dian is comically horrified upon meeting Niken and quickly goes back to his hometown to escape her.
• Played for Laughs in Parks and Recreation:
  Ben: So, what do we got so far? We need big ticket items.
  April: I got the Red Hot Chili Peppers to send us a signed guitar.
  Leslie: That's great, April! How'd you do that!?
  April: It's a long story but the short version is I'm currently catfishing Anthony Kiedis.
• Riverdale: Betty tries to get Kevin to catfish her brother Chic via webcam, in order to try and find out what Chic is hiding.
• Parodied on Saturday Night Live, with Adam Levine impersonating Nev Schulman. The spoof featured a girl named Jaz, who was in a long-term, caring relationship with model who didn't own a phone or a car or have any friends and looked like Brian Williams.
• Vera: In "Darkwater", Vera discovers that the Victim of the Week has been using to a local message board to catfish his bullies by thinking they were communicating with a Hot Teacher. This suddenly changes the nature of the case, as Vera realises he was not only the victim, but also a perpetrator.
• A 2021 arc of The Young and the Restless had Faith Newman texting with a boy she met online who claimed to go to her school, with her quickly being drawn in by how sweet and funny he is, and trying to guess who he was. When he finally gave her his name, he told her he loved her, and she responded in kind... only to post screencaps of their conversation all over social media for all her peers to see (conveniently leaving out the part where he baited her). When she asked why he would do that to her, "he" revealed he was actually Faith's so-called BFF, the Alpha Bitch Jordan, who had been stringing her along for weeks as a cruel joke.

Newspaper Comics

• A Dilbert strip did this once.
• Double Subverted in FoxTrot when Peter chats with someone claiming to be a model sharing many of his interests. He rolls his eyes since it's obviously his little brother, Jason, trying to fool him and starts sending violent threats. Then it turns out the model actually is an attractive girl, who is now calling the police.

Radio

• In The Train at Platform Four, Dev insists he was totally honest in his dating profile, which says he "runs a fast-moving catering business across four counties". He mans the buffet car on the London to York train.

Video Games

• During the Chain of Deals in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, an anthropomorphic goat named Christine asks Link to deliver a letter to Mr. Write (a nod to SimCity's Dr. Wright). But the photo included in the letter is of Princess Peach, one of many Mario-verse cameos in the game. Mr. Write thinks she's beautiful as a result, and happily starts composing his response. He never finds out the truth.

Visual Novels

• In Psycholonials, Z., Abby, and Percy scam Abby's mother out of millions-billions of dollars in a phishing scheme that relies on them pretending to be a sexy, middle-aged Republican financial advisor who engages in Intimate Telecommunications in addition to financial shenanigans with her.

Web Animation

• Daidus did this not for malicious reasons but to boost a friend's self-esteem after they had been rejected by girls too often. And it worked, the boost allowing the friend to successfully ask a girl out and get a girlfriend.
• Etra chan saw it!: Akamatsu cheats on his wife Akane with his gaming teammate Yuzuriha, with Loberia as her handle. Unfortunately for him, Yuzuriha turns out to be a fake identity operated by an overweight Hiiragi with a voice changer to deceive men into giving him money.

Web Video

• The Nostalgia Critic's review of Ready Player One (2018) parodies the Catfish show in its framing device. With Nev's help, Critic tries to figure out the identity of a cute girl he's chatting up on a VR game, but her username ("Hyper Fungirl") and avatar (short brown hair and glasses) makes it immediately clear it's Hyper Fangirl. Nev tells Critic that it's really not the kind of surprise they go for on the show, but Critic insists she must be using the avatar so Critic won't know she's ugly (as she has a small zit). Then at the end of the review, it's revealed that Benny was actually Hyper Fungirl, and Critic has to come to terms with those feelings.
• The AIM sketch of the Smosh video "If the Internet Was Real" has a creepy older man claim to be a 15-year-old girl and grotesquely lick Ian's ear.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • In the episode "The Catfish", Gumball and Darwin (who themselves are a cat and a fish) form a profile for a fake woman named Muriel to befriend their grandfather Louie on ElmorePlus, because their grandmother Jojo won't let him befriend anyone. When she finds out and goes psycho Yandere, Gumball and Darwin have to stop her from attacking the woman whose pic they used for the profile.
    Louie: Do you know what a cat and a fish pretending to be someone else online is called?
    Gumball: Cat... fishing?
    Louie: No! It's called... wait. Actually, yes, that is what it's called.
  • In "The Slide," Rocky joins the dating app Trawlr (a parody of Tinder), but all of his selfies look unintentionally terrifying. Gumball and Darwin apply a bunch of filters to his photo so he looks like an attractive human man. This leads to mishaps like his mother almost matching with him on the app. When Rocky tracks down a perfect girl who matched with him after accidentally rejecting her on the app, she gets mad at all the criminal behavior he's done to find her, and remarks how the "creepy guy" who stalked her looks nothing like the handsome profile picture.
• Animaniacs (2020): In "Mouse-churian Candidate", Pinky complains about having bad luck with online dating because he's always getting cat-fished. Then he shows Brain the phone he's using, where one of Pinky's potential dates is an actual catfish.
• In the Bojack Horseman episode "BoJack Hates the Troops", Todd Chavez starts online-dating with a Japanese woman named Ayako, who keeps asking him for personal information. It later turns out that she's a scammer attempting to steal all his money, who actually lives in Los Angeles (like he does) and can speak fluent English (contrary to how she was talking to him earlier).
• In The Boondocks episode "Attack of the Killer Kung-Fu Wolf Bitch", Robert Freeman has not just once, but several times, been a victim of catfishing. Robert had found and met a series of women through MySpace who looked very young and attractive in their profile pictures, but in reality they were all much older and uglier. Obviously, he was very shocked and disappointed by their deceptions.
• Futurama has a metaphorical example in "A Bicyclops Built for Two." While in a physical representation of an interne chatroom and video game, Leela meets another cyclops alien named Alcazar, and since she'd previously thought herself to be the only one of her species, she quickly starts a relationship with him. However, he turns out to be a shapeshifter who was pulling the same shtick with four other women, pretending to be another member of their species to use them for sex and housework.
• Robot Chicken did a sketch based on Catfish: The TV Show where Nev went around introducing characters who don't physically interact in their home series, like Inspector Gadget and Dr. Claw (Claw is in love with Gadget but too shy to interact with him any other way), Charlie's Angels and Charlie (Charlie is a teenage boy who gets off on directing them to seduce men and report back to him), and Noah and God (God is just a guy with a megaphone who wanted a boat).

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