Teenager addicted to catfishing reveals secrets of her sinister world

IT STARTED as an easy escape from her real life, but snowballed out of control. Now this woman is addicted to her own lie.

AS a master of pretending to be someone else online, this seasoned fraudster hates being described as a ‘catfish’.

“I resent the comparison,” she told Vice.

“Catfish are stupid creatures; to convince someone that you’re someone else online is careful, calculated work.”

Having spent the last eight years creating fabricated social media accounts, the girl who wishes to remain anonymous, knows a thing or two about the art of manipulation.

Now 21, she is undergoing extensive therapy for her catfishing addiction which began as a simple escape from her less than desirable life.

“I didn’t have any friends. I had suffered textbook childhood abuse; my father was in prison and my mother was an addict,” she said.

“I wanted to be anyone but me. I wanted a different outcome, a different life. I wanted to be a different person and with MySpace, I realised I could.”

The first time she filled the void in her life with catfishing came after she created an account under the guise of Amanda Williams.

“The fictional character I’d created was the version of me that I so desperately wanted to be,” she said.

“The profile had hundreds of friends and I was finally getting the attention from men that I had always wanted for myself.”

With the account a hit online, the girl devised a plan in which she messaged the popular girls from her school as Amanda to try and give her real-self some credibility within the in-crowd.

MySpace was the main hunting ground for this catfish.

However, the girls soon discovered the mobile number on Amanda’s account matched the number listed on her real account and the game was over.

“I went from being invisible to being totally shunned,” she said.

After failing to gain popularity through catfishing, the girl was the target of relentless bullying, which became so intense she was forced to change schools.

“What should’ve been an opportunity to reclaim my social life became fuel for my catfishing,” she said.

“I spent all my free time on social media, building Amanda Williams’s life like an avatar on The Sims.”

By now the girl had honed her craft and became meticulous about how she created the fabricated accounts.

She would scout the likes of Instagram to find a pretty girl with less than a 1000 followers and once located, she would steal her pictures.

“I don’t upload all of the stolen photos at once. I trickle them in, just like a normal person would,” she said.

“I always find the girl I’m stealing photos from on Facebook and I block every single person on her friends list.

“I’ve spent entire days doing this — actively blocking people who might catch on to the ruse.”

In addition to pictures, the girl would add close to 150 strangers to give the account authenticity.

She would also create other fake accounts she would use to pose as the fake friends on her fake profile.

With all the pieces of the puzzle complete, the girl was free to go about catfishing the world.

Although knowing what she was doing was wrong, she justified her actions by saying she never embezzled people out of money, rather only used the profiles to gain the attention she had always longed for.

“On the fake accounts, I could open up to people in a way that I couldn’t in real life,” she said.

“Other girls my age had boyfriends and best friends, but I had my MySpace friends — people who cared about me, who let me vent, who asked me about my day.

However, what started as a way to gain attention soon become a sick addiction that left her filled with the negative emotions she was trying to escape.

“I’ve never had a real friend, a real relationship. I’ve never had a job. I wasted all of my teenage years doing this,” she said.

“I’ve isolated myself so much that now, whenever I’m with groups of people, I get severe anxiety.

“I can barely leave my house, because the entire world that I’ve created for myself is inside of my computer.”

Today, the girl is working through her problems and has deactivated all of her fake accounts, except for Amanda Williams.

“My existence hinges on this fake account, because it has defined who I am for so long,” she said.

“But while Amanda Williams grew up, I never gave myself the chance.”