Dating is hard, and online dating is harder – you have to deal with anonymity, which, for some reason, makes people lie. A lot. And the worst kind of lying, the sort of thing that would be almost impossible to get away with dating in person, is catfishing: people pretending to be someone they simply are not, sometimes over the course of years. Check out these 10 stories from AskReddit users, on terrible catfishing experiences they had to deal with.

1. Road Trip

Not me but my older brothers best friend. He had been talking to this girl online for a really long time. He was planning on driving to Texas (we live in north Georgia) to visit her. When he told her that he was going to drive over to see her she confessed that she was actually an overweight 43 year old lady. He was 23 at the time. He doesn’t like to talk about it…

2. Runaway

The first time, a girl sent me pictures of herself and she looked like around my age. When we finally met for our first date, I realized that she was not the girl from the pictures because she was barely 18 and was enormous compared to the girl I had pictures of. She was apologetic, and explained that she sent me pictures of her sister instead of herself for various reasons. The lie about her age was only a slight problem because she had just turned 18 days before so I wasn’t in any legal danger. We remained friends for years.

The second time was the last time I tried to meet a girl online. I was a junior in college and had been talking to this girl a few states away for weeks online. She claimed to be 19 (I was 20) and she was a cute red head in the pics she sent me, so I chatted her up regularly even though she lived far away. At some point, she surprises me with her plan to take a bus out to my university and spend the weekend hanging out and partying with me.

When I picked her up at the bus stop I barely recognized her. She sort of looked like the cute redhead I had pictures of, but waaaaaay younger, like she could be the daughter of the girl I had been talking to online. I played it cool, trying to be a gentleman, but quickly decided that spending the weekend partying with what appears to be a 14-16 year old would be a bad idea. I told her that there were no good parties on the docket and took her home to my parents house where I figured we could lay low until Sunday when I could shuffle her back onto a bus and be rid of the jailbait.

Well, late the next evening while we were sitting on the living room floor watching a movie with my parents, the phone rings. I answered the phone to hear a crying woman pleading to know where her daughter was and if she is ok. That’s when it hit me… I was harboring a freakin’ teenage runaway. I got the girl on the phone with her mom, and started grabbing all of her stuff and putting in my car. Apparently her mom had found my phone number on their phone bill and traveled to my school looking for her daughter.

I promised to meet her on campus with her daughter ASAP. Well, we didn’t even make it out of the driveway before the police cars showed up. The cop looked at me, then pointed to the girl and said, “Is that her?”, and I replied, “yeah, take her home man” and that was it. Luckily for me, I think this girl may have had a history of running away from home because they didn’t ask me a single question or anything they just took the girl and left. Then my mom came out into the driveway asking why the cops were there… I had some ‘splainin’ to do.

And then, when I returned to school, all of my roommates and neighbors told me that the campus police, local police, and state police had been scouring the campus for me and an underage runaway. I spent the next couple weeks explaining to everyone I knew how I got hoodwinked by an internet girl and that the police had the story wrong. It could have gone worse I suppose…

3. True Love

My ex boyfriend (ohgoddontreadthis) met a girl on WoW who lives in Texas. He lives in the Midwest.

They talked for many months via WoW and email, but never via video chat. He told his parents about her as things were getting more serious, and they agreed to let her visit and stay at their house for a week so he and her could meet in person. The flight was bought for her, they discussed how excited they were to meet, and then the night before the flight, she admitted “she” was actually a 19 year old gay guy.

4. “If she could lie about that, what’s to stop her from something even bigger?”

I was about 16 at the time (24 now), and I had just discovered the social website Vampire Freaks (VF). . . judge me now if you’d like but I liked it. Back than Facebook hadn’t become huge and MySpace made it too difficult to find people in your area with similar interest. VF had a huge collection of gamers, cosplayers, otaku and “nerds”, which is my thing.

Ran into the girl that I thought was the love of my 16 year old life, we had the same interest, we talked on msn voice chat numerous times and sent “recent” pictures to each other all the time. It was awesome, we had a great time and generally seemed to connect really well. After 3 months I decided it was time to meet, I lived in Southern NJ and her in Upper NY, it was a bit of a hike. I lied to my mom and told her I was going to Philly, which was only a 15 min train ride, and set off on an adventure of epic proportion. After hopping on two trains and walking for 2 hours, 5 hours total, I had finally arrived at our meeting point, a cafe in her neighborhood.

I was waiting in line to get a cup a of coffee when suddenly a monstrous shadow that could be compared to the sun caught the corner of my eye. Chills went down my spine, as I heard my name get called out. The girl who had just sent me a picture last night had gained 120 pounds, and caused the ground the quake beneath her. Having little to no experience of the outside world I panicked, turned and said the most disappointing greeting of my life. I ended up spending the rest of the day with her, I tried not to be a jerk and bring up the fact that she lied to me. In the end she went for the kiss and I just gave her the cheek.

I probably would’ve dated her if she hadn’t lied to me, I’m a romantic and feel as though beauty is on the inside. But if she could lie about something like that, what’s to stop her from something even bigger.

5. Entrapment

A friend of mine was dating my cousin, and she suspected him of cheating on her. So to see if he would really be capable of such a thing, she made a fake MySpace (yes it was back in the day). She found pictures from the Internet of regular girls his type, and compiled together the ones of girls who looked similar enough to be mistaken as being the same girl. It was actually pretty talented of her. Every picture was of a different girl, but you would have though they were all the same. I have no idea how many man hours she put into this account, but she friended my cousin and talked for a while, then asked to meet up. When my cousin said ok, my friend promptly broke up with him. It was total entrapment, but it got the truth out, so kudos to her.