Catfishing in 2025 Isn’t What You Think, According to ‘What We Said’

Catfishing goes beyond a fake profile on a dating app. In the year 2025, catfishers have officially gone pro. On What We Said, best friends and cohosts Jaci Marie Smith and Chelsey Jade Curtis unpack listener-submitted catfish stories that will fundamentally change the way you think about deception. These aren’t simple tales of someone using their high school crush’s photos to flirt online, either. This is actual  psychological warfare operations disguised as friendship. 

Catfishers have leveled up

Traditional catfishing was pretty straightforward: someone creates a fake online persona, usually using stolen photos, to start a romantic relationship. They’d string you along, make excuses about why they couldn’t FaceTime, and eventually either ask for money or just enjoy the emotional manipulation. The 2010 documentary Catfish and the subsequent MTV series made this type of scam famous. You learned to look for red flags—refusal to video chat, overly perfect photos, stories that didn’t quite add up. A quick reverse image search could usually expose them.

That playbook is obsolete.

The new generation of catfishers aren’t hiding behind screens, but standing right next to you. They’re your study buddy, your roommate’s “friend from high school,” the person who somehow always shows up at the same coffee shop. And they’re not just lying about what they look like. They’re lying about their entire existence.

Smith reads a listener story about “Allen” that proves just how sophisticated the game has gotten. “Allen was the kind of gay best friend every girl thinks she wants…somehow able to make you feel like the most important person in the room.” He claimed he’d be starting at the same school and even rented an apartment near campus—except he never enrolled anywhere.

“I rarely ran into real friends randomly, but somehow I was bumping into Allen constantly outside class,” she says. “He always brushed it off, ‘Oh, we must have similar schedules.’” Eventually, the truth came out. “He secretly shared our phone locations with himself,” the listener shares That’s how he timed his “coincidences.” He weaponized tech to manufacture proximity.

Then there’s “Stacy.” A woman in her 60s with a perfect resumé—pilot’s license, globetrotter, accomplished. But when she failed to deliver a six-month work project, she launched the kind of backstory you’d see in a thriller: she’d been shot, was hospitalized, attacked in the hospital, and forced into witness protection to stay alive. None of it was true. “She was never shot, never in the hospital, never attacked,” Curtis reads. The entire narrative existed to avoid accountability.

Experts point out that as we get savvier to online scams, catfishers are evolving, now building multi-layered identities that blend in-person interactions, mutual friends, and believable life details to seem real. 

Why this version destroys lives—and why you’d fall for it too

This new breed of catfishing doesn’t just steal trust, it hijacks your reality, and that’s what makes it so devastating. Because here’s the thing, we’re wired to believe people who seem real. When someone gives you mutual friends, shows up at the same coffee shop, drops casual in-person cues, you let your guard down. That’s the warranting principle in action—we trust what others “back up” more than what someone says about themselves.

And so catfishers don’t start with fake faces anymore, they start with believable backstories and gradual proximity. That’s what Allen and Stacy were doing. That’s what turns doubt into confusion.

Once they’re in, the damage is intense:

• Emotional devastation. Shame, confusion, self-doubt. Victims often feel like fools, even though the deception was highly calculated. Therapists call this a betrayal trauma—when someone you trusted manipulates your perception of reality, it can shatter your sense of safety.
• Isolation from others. Since the lies are built into real life, you don’t know who to trust. You might withdraw from friends or second-guess every relationship you have.
• Practical ruin. Money lost to scams, jobs jeopardized, reputations damaged. These aren’t just romantic losses. They can ripple into every corner of life.
• Gaslighting and cognitive overload. When you try to question the lie, they gaslight you or redirect with dramatic crises. Your brain exhausts itself trying to parse truth from performance.

Part of why so many fall for this version is investment. When you’ve spent time, energy, emotional bandwidth, pulling back feels riskier than staying suspicious. And if they give you rare kindness, your brain holds onto hope. That kind of cost + reward pattern is a prison. Then there’s societal pressure. If you admit you got duped, people may shame you. That shame makes victims stay quiet…it all builds into a perfect storm.

How to spot a 2025 catfish and kick them to the curb

Start with the basics. Money asks? Hard pass. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report says romance scams are still one of the costliest online crimes, and they almost always involve “urgent” money requests. If someone hits you with a sob story and a Venmo, that’s your cue to block and report.

Then check for real-world proof. Google their job. Search the company directory. Ask mutual friends you actually know. If they claim to go to your school, verify it through official records, not screenshots of a “student portal.” And while you’re at it, give them a reverse image search. If they pop up on a stock image site, congratulations, you just saved yourself a breakdown.

If everything checks out, hit them with a spontaneity test. The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre says deepfakes are now slick enough to pass casual FaceTime checks. So throw them off script—ask them to wave, hold up a random object, or pan their camera. Real people can do that without freezing or glitching.

Still getting weird vibes? Pay attention. Watch for behavioral red flags. If someone is too emotionally intense too soon, isolates you from friends, or flips into crisis mode whenever you question them, that’s not passion, that’s manipulation. Trust your discomfort. If something feels off, it most likely is.

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