What Is Catfishing?
Catfishing is a term that gets used loosely online, but it has a specific meaning: someone creating a fake or misrepresented identity — usually with stolen or fabricated photos — to build a relationship or extract something from another person under false pretenses.
This page explains what catfishing actually is, where it typically happens, why people do it, and what you can do to protect yourself.
What Catfishing Means
At its core, catfishing is identity deception. The person behind the fake profile is real, but the identity they present — their name, photos, job, location, or life story — is partly or entirely fabricated. Most catfish accounts use photos of a real person (often taken from public social media or modeling portfolios) who has no idea their images are being used this way.
Where Catfishing Happens
Catfishing is most commonly associated with dating apps, but it happens anywhere people build relationships without meeting in person:
- Dating apps and dating websites
- General social media, through unsolicited messages or comments
- Online games and gaming-adjacent chat platforms like Discord
- Messaging apps, often after being introduced through another platform
Catfishing vs. Other Online Deception
It's worth distinguishing catfishing from a few related but different things. Someone lying about their age by a couple of years or exaggerating their job title is common (if not exactly honest) online behavior, not catfishing. Catfishing specifically involves presenting as a different identity — different photos, a different name, a different life — rather than a stretched version of a real one. It's also different from account hacking or takeover, where someone gains unauthorized access to an existing real account rather than building a new fake one.
How to Protect Yourself
Treat early claims about someone's identity as unverified until you have some independent confirmation.
Check whether their pictures appear anywhere else online under a different name — see the photo search page for how this works.
A real-time, unscripted video call is one of the hardest things for a catfish to fake convincingly.
Be cautious of anyone who professes strong feelings unusually quickly or pressures you to move fast.
AI Social Finder can help you search publicly available information starting from a photo, username, email, phone number, or address.
Types of Catfishing
Catfishing narratives vary, but most converge on one of a handful of underlying asks. Grouped below by what the scammer is ultimately after, with the specific scam patterns that use each one.
Is Catfishing Illegal?
It depends on where you are and exactly what happened. A number of US states have enacted laws specifically targeting online impersonation, while others rely on general fraud, harassment, or identity-theft statutes to address the same conduct. If money changed hands, federal fraud law may also apply. See the report a catfish section for the reporting agency and, where one exists, the specific statute for your state or country.
Related Reading
If you want a practical checklist of red flags, see Signs of a Catfish. If you already suspect someone specific, the Am I Being Catfished quiz walks through common warning signs for your situation.