6. OOF

13 years ago, I was 18 years old, very awkward, but still felt respectable. I had my own car and a job. I didn’t go to college though, and I didn’t know any way to meet people except through the Internet. I remember I found Jessie on the Literotica forums. She said she was 19 and lived less than an hour’s drive from me. In Los Angeles, that’s not bad. She sent me her picture and she was beautiful. We exchanged phone numbers.

We would talk for HOURS on the phone. I forget everything we talked about, but I really connected with her. She was smart, had a mature, sexy voice, and was studying to be a doctor at UCLA. Eventually, we started having phone sex and cyber sex.

We tried to meet a couple times, but she got nervous and chickened out. I wasn’t suspicious though. I mean, the Internet was new for a lot of people and it was understandable that someone would be nervous about meeting a stranger like that. Never the less, I told my real life friends about her. I introduced her to the online hangouts I frequented. She got to know my people and she charmed them as much as she did me. They all thought I was lucky.

One day, over the phone, Jessie invited me to come see her perform at a play and I got really excited. But she broke down crying and was inconsolable for a few minutes while I tried to figure out what had set her off. She told me that she had a confession to make. When I finally convinced her to just tell me, I had slowed my breathing down and was a picture of serenity, ready to have reality driven into the back of my skull like a railroad spike.

She wasn’t 19, she was 14. She wasn’t a student at UCLA, she was a student at one of those “special needs” high schools in the Valley. She wasn’t beautiful, she was fat and ugly. The play wasn’t Shakespeare, it was Seussical, and she was the elephant.

I don’t know why I agreed to see it. I guess I held out some sliver of hope that she was lying to test my resolve or that she had some hidden quality that shined through all of the shit that had just been dumped onto me. I drove up to the school and felt like a creep. Her mother was there, with a shiner that the father had given her. Apparently Jessie had told her mother about me, and it was her mother who recognized me and invited me to sit beside her. There’s something sad about how, in the pure pathetic nature of this whole situation, the miserable, battered mother actually thought her developmentally challenged daughter had an admirer. I declined silently, hating that I was a part of this, still wondering what I was doing.

The lights went down and the curtain was drawn. And there she was, bounding around on the stage. Clearly the most talented of special kids. Clearly the largest of them, too. During intermission, I stood up and walked outside, into the parking lot. I got into my car and drove away. I turned my stereo off and sat silently, listening to the road for an hour. I never spoke to her again and I never told any of my friends what happened to her.

7. Never heard of her

Friend and I frequent dating sites. He was catfished once. Her name was Alexis Mc.Nally. She was the head RN at a hospital a half hour away making $150,000 a year and was in love with my friend. She was going to fly him to Vegas after 3 weeks of knowing him and they were going to get married. He was happy as hell and thinking of pretty much nothing but the money and the hot pictures she was sending him.

She said she bought him all this stuff and his kids Ipads and computers and that she had a multimillion dollar house she was going to live in with him.

He didn’t think anything was odd but I did so I did some research. First I called the hospital and they said they never heard of her. Then looked up her phone number which the area code was from Ohio. After a while he wised up and started calling her out on stuff. She ended up sending him a box filled with new American Eagle clothes for him and that was pretty much the end of it.

8. Last name please?

Fairly attractive Asian girl started messaging me in a chat room on gay.com. I am lesbian, so the gay.com chatrooms for the women weren’t really known for having bots.

She comes on strong and actually shows a lot of interest in me even though I didn’t really have much interest in her at first since she was in Florida and I’m in Oklahoma.

I actually start to really like her and think maybe we could really hit it off if we met. We started talking/texting pretty much 24/7.

Then she tells me about how she can’t date anyone locally because her dad is a marine engineer and builds multimillion dollar yachts for famous people.

I don’t really believe it at first, but she starts mailing me all these fairly expensive things like clothes, flowers, gift cards, etc to ‘prove’ it, even though I tell her I didn’t really want them.

The weird thing is she wouldn’t tell me her last name and would be very weird about it, saying if I found it out I could Google it and it’ll pull up her dad’s yacht business and I could see how rich they really are and she wanted to make sure that I really wanted to be with her and wasn’t just in it for the money…. Even though she kept sending me gifts without me asking to “prove” her wealth.

She also said she was a head hair stylist at Tony&Guy and made $700/day in tips.

Anyway, one of the gifts she sent the company sent a receipt slip that had her last name on it. I Googled it and nothing really pulled up. Even (name) Yachts, nothing. (Name) yachts Florida, nothing. Nothing at all came up for it.

Things started to seem weird so I called the Tony&Guy she claimed she worked at and asked if I could schedule with her. No one worked there with that name.

I waited a couple days to tell her that her name came on the receipt.

When I did she flipped the f**k out and said I was crazy and that she was going to stop talking to me anyway because she has cancer then hung up on me and disconnected the number within minutes.

It was so weird. I don’t know what the point of that catfish was, I’m the one who got a bunch of stuff, and I didn’t even ask for any of it.

Oh well, I still wear some of the stuff she got me lol

9. Radically different

I met a girl on OKC, very nice, we clicked pretty quickly and talked for about a month before deciding to meet up. There were no immediate red flags in her profile and her pictures looked legit.

We agreed on a park (I’m a cheap date, what can I say?) for our first meeting and I was lying back on a grassy hill when I hear a voice say my name. I look up and see…someone I don’t recognize at all. I was confused and asked her if I knew her. She was quiet for a second before revealing it was the girl I’d been talking to.

She looked radically different from her pictures; the girl I saw in the pictures was quite pretty, very fit, looked like she took good care of herself. The girl that showed up…less so. She was much plainer looking, much more weight than the girl in the photos, and much less sure of herself now.

I asked her why she’d lied, especially considering that I actually did find her real self attractive. She burst into tears and said she was so scared that people wouldn’t like her that she felt like she had to do this. She had a lot of self-image problems, her shirt sleeve slipped up a couple times and there were a lot of scars.

Initially I was pissed. I’m a really chill, good natured dude (at least I try to be) and I really hate when people take advantage of that. We talked for a little while and she admitted she was terrified of people and their reaction to how she looked and that this approach helped her get past that. I explained that lying about it wasn’t going to help.

We actually had a pretty good conversation and kept in touch after that but she stopped responding to pretty much everything about two months later. She stopped answering her phone and the texts dropped off. I hope she’s alright and that she stopped catfishing people. It was a shame because I did actually find her attractive and she wasn’t a horrendous human being but I can’t start a relationship on that big of a lie.

After that, I’ve started looking on catfishers with a little more empathy. A lot of them are people who have social issues and don’t mean to be malicious or to hurt people. That doesn’t make it more acceptable, but it’s easier to understand.

10. Similar looking

A girl messaged me on a dating website. She looked “ok” in her pics and I hadn’t been on a date in months, so I figured why not. I invited her to Starbucks. Her profile said she was 5’4, about average body type (matched the picture) and was a red head. I was ok with all of this.

I go to Starbucks that weekend to meet her. Notice she’s not outside, so I go inside to see if I find her. I step inside and look around.

The Starbucks was small, but all the tables were full. Then the girl stands up as she recognized me and approached me.

The girl was a full 6 feet tall and towered over me. At this point I was a little intimidated because that’s not the 5’4 I expected. I also started to notice that she looked a little different from her pictures and realized she used a picture of a “similar” looking red head for her own. I then look around me and see the entire Starbucks customers and staff are watching us.

It’s here I realized this is why she waited inside, if we were surrounded by a bunch of people she thought I wouldn’t make a scene or just flat out walk out on her (it was literally my first instinct). Completely surprised and caught off guard, she asked if I wanted to buy a drink and meet her outside. Shit, she thought this through.

I grabbed a drink and sat down with her. Almost immediately she just starts talking and tells me she’s the last one of her friends who isn’t married and doesn’t have kids. I look over at her, with my bugged out eyes hidden behind my shades and notice she’s trying to smile but there’s something off. She had bell palsy. Girl also made it obvious to the Starbucks audience so again, if I walked out on her instantly I would look like an asshole (or so she would hope).

She then starts to tell me how she literally almost bought the same condo I did just before me (I never told her I lived there, nor that I was the one who ended up buying it). Creepy.

I told her that she didn’t match her profile. She said it was “her info.”

Sure.

I tell her I have to run and she walks with me as I’m on the way to her car. She asks me if I would be interested in a second date. Well, I had no need to be honest with her

“Sure, I’ll check my schedule and email you on the site.”

“Or you could text me!”

“Uh, yea, I’ll text you instead” (there was no F***ING WAY on Buddha’s fat belly I was going to text her and let her have my number)

I walked into another building and made she she left before I got in my car and never talked to her again.