Catfished ... Why?

I have recently started watching episodes of the TV show "Catfish", still on the air after maybe five seasons.  It makes you think, it really does.

If you are unfamiliar with the premise, "catfishing" is a sadly-common practice, since the onset of online dating sites and chat rooms and the like, meaning, for a long time.  The catfish is typically a "lives in Mom's basement" type, who goes onto those Internet sites using a fake profile with pictures of a much better-looking guy or gal whom they then pretend to be, never intending to meet the target but to have intimate conversations (and, often, solicit explicit pictures).

I have known people who actually have been catfished by these types personally.  A famous instance was depicted on the TV show "Sister Wives", where one of the polygamous husband's four wives was catfished by a female pretending to be a male, which led to some very embarrassing subsequent episodes that the show, to its credit, aired in all its embarrassing non-glory.

The TV show "Catfish" is essentially an investigative tale.  The only reason I didn't watch it for years is that I thought it was a setup show where famous people were taken advantage of.  It is definitely not that.  Actually, people who suspect that friends, loved ones or even themselves are being catfished contact the show, and the two hosts then interview the victim, gather data and then do lots of detective work to nail down who is actually making the calls, texts and the like.

Eventually the hosts go fly to see the catfish in person along with the victim, and the meetings of those folks are some really interesting television.  And every episode has some form of that uncomfortable meeting.  Yes, on rare occasions it turns out somewhat OK, to the extent that relationships where people have never met but at least one of them is really committed can turn out OK.

The hosts' work in getting to that point involves a lot of reverse phone-number lookups, image searches, that sort of thing -- stuff that you or I could do.  The catfish victim could do that, of course, too -- except for one thing.

They don't seem to want to.

That's pretty much the point of this.  For the most part, the catfish perps (at least as discovered by the show's hosts) are homely, overweight types, sometimes straight and sometimes gay (but sometimes targeting victims who are not).  They seem to be using the stolen pictures to represent them as the people they wish they looked like.  They are as much pathetic as pernicious; it is easy to dislike them because of what they do, but you know they're often in some sort of fantasy.

But so are the victims.

Let me give you my example.  This was a tenant in a townhouse I once owned, divorced with a couple kids with serious problems.  As part of her explanation of why her rent was late, she insisted that a person she described as her "boyfriend" would be back in the country from the Middle East soon, where he managed on an offshore oil platform.  He would, he told her, pay for everything including the next six months of rent as soon as he returned.

I had not even heard of that particular "offshore oil platform" story (though I would later hear an almost exactly-the-same version from a different target, in a segment of the Dr. Phil show a month ago).  I wasn't even familiar then with the notion of catfishing when the tenant told the story -- and I still could tell right away this was a fraud.  I told the tenant it sounded very suspicious, and when she told me she had not yet met her "boyfriend", I told her to find another source of rent that, you know, actually existed.  Naturally, within a couple weeks she realized this guy didn't.

As much as you can characterize the catfish perps, now that the show actually brings them out into the light, you can really characterize the victims as well.  Riddled with self-doubt, desperate for love, affection and attention, it is abysmally easy to promise the victims lifelong love and get them to tell the catfish that they're devoted to them, and miss them, and want to be together.  And, of course, to send explicit pictures.  That's a pretty sadly common theme.

Here's the problem.  I'm watching a couple episodes of the show, and I start to realize that the psychological and emotional issues that allow someone to be catfished on the Internet are not new.  People have always felt the way those victims do; it's just that there is now an Internet to allow them to be taken advantage of.

So I wonder ... what used to happen, say, 50 or 100 years ago to those people?  Did they go to bars, meet lowlifes with a good line and have their lives destroyed?  Did they just hole up and read romance novels for their whole life and use books as their fantasy?

People have always needed to be loved.  There also have always been the pathetic types who would prey on their need for affection.  It's a shame that there is now not only a medium for taking that pursuit to a fairly professional level, but an outlet for the desperate, to where they are putting their desperation out to the world.

I couldn't be much sadder.  But I guess I'm very lucky.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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