My experience with catfishing and how I came to understand it and see it date back to the misty year of 1983.
I was a freshman at a major engineering school, and the campus had a extremely (for it's day) modern mainframe computer system that was networked to about 100 terminals scattered around campus. Those terminals were the giant green screen cathode ray ones you see ion old movies.
Anyhow there was a program on the mainframe called CONNECT, and it was amazingly like what AOL messenger would be in a decade and change. It allowed you to create a private chat with another terminal on campus. And you could type back and forth with someone. It was pretty novel at the time, and students used it a lot.
One night I was working on a project and got a connect request and answered and ended up having a conversation with a young woman who was on the other side of the campus. I chatted with them for a few hours as I worked on the code I was writing. They were feeling lonely, and homesick and all the things that freshmen often feel when at school away from home for the first time, and just wanted to talk. I was not looking for a relationship at that moment, and didn't press to "Hey let's meet and talk in person at the Student Union" or any such tangent that would lead to physical interaction. I was just enjoying the distraction of a chat while I was working.
At about three hours in she said... "Ummm you've been really nice to me, and listened to me for all this time, I feel bad that I lied to you about being a girl, I'm a guy."
My attitude was "Huh." but I typed "No big deal, I wasn't talking to you because you were a woman, but because it was a decent conversation that was enjoyable. Why did you lie?"
To summarize he told me that he really was lonely and homesick and he'd tried to talk to people about it and was basically ignored. He'd made no close friends on campus yet (which I could believe because at that point neither had I) and he just wanted to talk to anyone and by pretending to be a woman on our campus with a 8:1 male to female ratio he found out that guys would talk to him when he was a 'her', and he'd feel a bit better.
We talked a bit more, and I even chatted with him in person a few time over the school year, though he left for a different school after his freshman year (Hope he was happier there) and that was the end of it.
But it gave me a few lessons that I made into my foundation of online interaction.
1) People online can pretend to be anything they want by just saying so.
2) They will do it for reasons that often make no sense.
3) Some will be malicious others just trying to cope with something via a lie.
4) My own expectations and desires for what I wanted out of an interaction mattered when I met a new person.
Those 4 rules have always guided me.
That lonely guy provided me with a valuable lesson as I've moved forward.
What do you want? What do they want? After those questions are answered in your head, then you know how to protect yourself from being catfished, or can simply not care.
And the story above about the sister who died is a real one from the chats history, as are dozens of others who played such games. It's been more then a decade since the last real hardcore malicious trolls were rooted out of the room, and mostly since it's been a lot of low end gender flips with an aim to get some wank-bank material from a live person rather then a bit of media. Shrug.
Myriads