Even if you don’t know of the Catfish documentary and/or show, I’m pretty confident that you’ve heard of the term before. For those that don’t know; a ‘catfish’ (excluding the diverse group of ray-finned fish) is a person who pretends to be someone they are not online, usually through the use of social media e.g Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To ‘catfish’ or ‘catfishing’ is the verb and being ‘catfished’ means you’ve been fooled by someone who is a catfish.
Now we’ve got the educational part of this post out of the way, let me teach you how you can avoid falling victim to a catfish online through one of my recent experiences.
A couple of days ago an attractive female entered my Instagram DMs with a warm welcome.
I was instantly sceptical because, in my experience and according to my general observations in life, females are usually very hesitant to message a guy first. That was a red flag.
Also, look at how many followers she has and the lack of pictures of her on her profile, TWO red flags.
So even though I had my obvious doubts, I continued the conversation because I knew there would be two outcomes; A – I’d create a new fan of my music or,  B – I’d have an interesting post to write. I bet you can guess how this one turned out.
So after a bit of boring small talk, she asks me where I’m from and whatnot, and I answer and reply in order to keep the convo going whilst I did some investigating.
Using my catfish hunting skills I hopped on to the greatest tool in my arsenal – Google Images. I screenshotted her photo on my iPhone and emailed it to myself. I then dragged her picture into the magical Google image pot and this is what I found.
I found a few different links to Twitter pages that had posted the same photo, but I also saw a name that came up more than once – Acacia Brinley. I clicked on one of the photos and there the name was again. I googled “Acacia Brinley” and I found her Twitter profile.
She has over 600k followers and she’s been active since 2009, at this point I knew that this was the person in the picture. I’d never heard of, or knew about her before this, so that was a smart decision by the catfish in question, I’ve since found out that Acacia Brinley is a YouTuber who does make-up videos and that kinda shit, so it’s no wonder I didn’t recognise her. But black man cyant fool again, my lard – word to Big Narstie.
I then created a trap for this catfish to fall in, I asked her to confirm that she was the person in the picture, by doing this, I pushed her in a corner and forced her to become trapped within her web of lies.
She confirmed it, TWICE. I then exposed her and told her I knew it was not her in the photo, to which she replied this:
At this point I was chuffed with myself, I had my story, I had the proof that I was right and now I just wanted to see how far this person would go to defend their lie.
She then sent me this picture! :
Come on, be serious, if you’re gonna pretend to be someone from Dubai at least pick a picture of someone with a tan.
I then asked her to prove her identity to see if she would actually go through the effort of using photoshop to further her lie, but she took the easy way out and blocked me instead.
And that’s how it’s done my g. That’s how to avoid being catfished online.
Let’s recap quickly:
- Check out their profile. If they have under 50 followers, that’s a red flag
- If they have no pictures of themselves on their profile, that’s a red flag
- Use google image search on the picture of the person they claim to be. If someone with a different name comes up, you guessed it, that’s a fucking red flag.
Now you should have the tools to set out on your own journeys as a master catfish hunter. Be safe online and be sceptical, you never know who’s really behind that computer screen.
Don’t miss a post! Sign up to my mailing list to get my daily updates sent to your email address.