unsuspecting woman messaging a catfish on her phone at night

Why Is It Called Catfishing? Behind the Romance Scam

By Dan Ketchum•

Key Takeaways: 

  • Catfishing is an incredibly common scam, with victims in the tens of thousands yearly.
  • It traces its history and name back to the early 2010s.
  • Though catfish scams have evolved, there are still methods for outsmarting them.

In the U.S., roughly 20,000 people per year report losing a collective total of $740 million per year to romance-based catfishing scams alone. Worldwide, catfishing victims lose an average of $14,574 each, and romance scams are among the top 10 most common scams in general. 

But how did we get here? What does it mean to catfish someone? And why is it called catfishing in the first place? 

To expose catfishing before it happens to you, let’s start at the beginning of the scam, and trace its evolution to today — because the catfishers are learning, but you can still outsmart them before you take the bait. 

Why Is It Called Catfishing, Anyway? The History of a Scam

What Does It Mean to Catfish Someone?

First off, what is a catfish? A catfish is someone who uses false information — typically conveyed via texts, DMs, or phone calls, and often including images — in order to trick another person. Usually, they hide behind fake social media profiles with the intent of financially scamming or psychologically harassing victims. 

And catfishing is a psychological practice indeed. In this long-form grift, a catfish or catfisher (the terms are used interchangeably) commonly creates a fully formed character narrative, appeals to the victim’s sense of empathy and their emotions, makes them vulnerable in order to exploit them, and carefully manipulates them to get what they want.  

Catfishing: A Short History

While no one knows the very first time a trickster catfished someone, modern-day catfishing was undoubtedly canonized by two key events. One is the story of Dr. Anna Akbari, an educated and successful NYC sociologist and professor who, alongside two other high-achieving women, met “Ethan Schuman” on dating apps around 2010. As chronicled in the 2024 book There Is No Ethan, “Ethan” forged intellectually stimulating, long-distance relationships with all three women over the course of months, exchanging thousands of messages but always making up excuses as to why “he” couldn’t video call or meet in person. Eventually, the women deduced that “Ethan” was in reality a persona created and acted out by Emily Marantz, a doctor from Livingston, New Jersey. (Ethan’s true identity was revealed with the help of PeopleWin’s parent company Spokeo—and our people search is powered by the same algorithm that helped uncover the con.)

Also in 2010, a documentary entitled Catfish covered a similar true story, in which a young photographer is tricked into a remote romance by a married woman hiding behind a fictional younger persona composed of Facebook profiles and stolen photos. The film’s title coined the term we still use today — and, yes, its producers went on to create the MTV reality show of the same name, which ran from 2012 to 2024. 

Why Is It Called Catfishing? 

In the 2010 doc, Vince Wesselman, husband of the titular Catfish in question, Angela Wesselman, cooked up a metaphor that struck a nerve. He speaks of live cod being shipped overseas, mentioning that the fish become inactive along the way, degrading the quality of the meat. To prevent the cod from idling, fishermen put catfish in the tanks to keep them active.

Wesselman compares his fraudster wife to this catfish, because, at least according to him, she keeps the lives of those around her “interesting” (that’s one way to put it). Thus, Angela became the OG “catfish,” and the term has stuck around ever since. 

broken heart as a result of someone being catfished

Varieties of Catfish 

From Catfishing, to Catphishing

OG catfish like Emily Marantz and Angela Wesselman did it for the love of the game; these types of catfish just get some sort of personal, psychological satisfaction out of the power-tripping process of psychological manipulation, to the psychologically draining detriment of their victims.

Nowadays, that’s not enough for most catfish. In the 2020s, catfishing largely exists as a method for scamming people, not just in order to break their hearts, but to get to their bank accounts. This is typically done in tandem with a common type of scam called phishing, in which a scammer takes on a fake identity (as a person, organization, or company) in order to either directly extract money from their victims or to get a hold of their valuable private information in order to commit financial fraud. 

Catphishing comes in all kinds of unfortunate shapes and sizes, including:  

  • Romance scams. The most prevalent form of catfishing and catphishing alike. Like the original psychological versions, grifters here match with victims on dating apps or DM them cold, hiding behind fake profiles to appeal to romantic interests. The “romance” often leads to extracting financial gifts from victims, or appealing to their emotions to “borrow” money for heart-wrenching (and totally made-up) emergencies.In other cases, long-form conversations can be used to gather enough private information to commit identity theft or blackmail. Or, victims can be lured in by too-good-to-be-true online beauties and led to click links that will infect their devices with malware to commit financial fraud.
  • Military catfish. Catfishers love to use fake military personas to rope in victims to the extent that this has become its own sub-genre of romance scams. This generates sympathy as well as providing plentiful excuses to avoid meeting in person and ask for money (often for healthcare and travel, which — heads up — the real military already provides).
  • Crypto catfish. Because it’s largely unregulated and hard to trace, catfish love to lure victims into crypto scams. What starts with online chemistry often becomes a too-good-to-be-true “opportunity” to “invest” in some crypto. In reality, you’ll be “investing” in the catfisher’s bank account.

The Evolution of a Catfish

In recent years, the proliferation of machine-learning-based AI and machine-learning tools, commonly known as generative AI, has revolutionized the catfishing game, for the worse. Because this now easily accessible tech can generate realistic images, voices, and even videos of a made-up person, it’s enabled catfishers to create fraudulent personas from scratch, and nearly instantly. It has also allowed them to easily generate “evidence” for their personas, like pictures of them in specific places, and some even use automated chat functionality to contact and converse with victims, sans human input.

That killer combo of quickness and automation also leads to much more voluminous output from scammers, and potentially increases the total amount of scams perpetrated. It’s already thought that more than 50% of fraud already involves the use of AI.

How to Catch a Catfish

There are a ton of catfish in the sea (OK, we know catfish are freshwater fish, just bear with the metaphor), and just as many variations of the scam. But no matter how far sketchy technology advances, catfishing relies on the same fundamentals today as it did in 2010. That means you can spot certain patterns that indicate you’re being catfished, so you can swim away before you get reeled in. Common red flags include: 

  • Photos that seem too good to be true.
  • Extremely low follower counts and brand-new social media profiles, or handles with funky, meaningless names (keyboard gibberish like “@PtvpfN4678”).
  • “Love bombing,” or bombarding you with attention and over-the-top affection from the outset.
  • Moving way too fast in the online relationship.
  • Pressuring you to keep the relationship secret or to alienate your friends and family.
  • Poor grammar, inconsistencies in stories, or chatbot-esque speech patterns.
  • Trying to get you to move to another app (conveniently, apps that are harder to track and provide easier access to private information, like WhatsApp, Snapchat, or WeChat).
  • They constantly make excuses as to why they can’t voice chat, talk on the phone, video chat, or meet in person.
  • And the biggest, reddest flag: they ask you for money.

FAQs 

What’s the difference between catfishing and trolling? 

“Trolling” is when someone deliberately tries to upset or provoke someone online, often to bait them into an emotional reaction. While catfishing is generally more serious and complex than trolling, catfish like Marantz and Wesselman didn’t financially exploit or blackmail their victims, and because lying isn’t a crime, they weren’t charged as criminals. They did attempt to get some sort of emotional reaction from their victims, though, so you could technically call non-criminal catfishing a complicated, long-form version of trolling. 

Is calling someone a catfish an insult? 

Yeah, probably. Catfish lie and manipulate in order to hurt and rob their victims, so we’d say being a catfish is generally not a good thing.

How do you outsmart a catfisher?

If it seems fishy, it may be catfishy. Here’s how to outmaneuver a slippery catfish, before they can get to your heart, or your bank account:

  • Do a reverse image search of their photos and see if you get any hits.
  • Check for telltale signs of phony genAI imagery, such as incorrect fingers and hands, distorted or illogical details, or an over-smoothed look.
  • Ask to meet in person or hop on a call.
  • Ask a lot of questions, and look for inconsistencies in the narrative.
  • Never click on links you don’t recognize, and never send money, crypto, gift cards, financial information, or valuable private info to someone you’ve never met in person.
  • Trust your gut; if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

And don’t forget the most powerful, one-and-done method for busting catfish: a PeopleWin People Search. If you’ve got a hunch, just enter the suspected catfisher’s provided phone number, name or email address, and we’ll instantly cross-reference billions of public records to search for names, aliases, addresses, criminal histories, marriage records (and way more) associated with that info, so you’ll know if who you’re talking really is who they claim to be. 

Because if you ask us, catfish is best served fried.

As a freelance writer, small business owner, and consultant with more than a decade of experience, Dan has been fortunate enough to collaborate with leading brands including Microsoft, Fortune, Verizon, Discover, Office Depot, The Motley Fool, and more. He currently resides in Dallas, TX.