When people hear the word “catfish”
the first thing they often associate it with is online dating, but there are
many more reasons why people create a false identity. For instance, it is used
for scamming such as the well known “Nigerian Prince” scam. This scam has been
e-mailed around thousands of times, since the first years of when e-mail
existed. In fact, it is highly
likely that you received some variation of the e-mail at a point unless it went
straight to your spam folder. The sender impersonates himself as a wealthy
ambassador or member of foreign royalty. After making a formal introduction, he
offers a big reward if you help move millions of dollars from his homeland into
your bank account. Word play is used to deceive the reader to feel convinced
and encouraged to believe the deception. He proceeds by asking to send your
banking info as quickly as possible to pressure the recipient even more. This
may seem like something hard to believe that someone can fall for but it
happens quite often, just as much as people fall for online-dating profiles. Of
course over the years, we are more educated and informed of such frauds and
therefore are less gullible to such lies. This scam is also now known as “419”
or the “Advance Fee Fraud” scheme and millions of e-mails are sent each year. [
i ] Another common scam is called the “Russian Brides Scam” where someone
impersonates living in Russia and is looking to marry someone from America.
After talking and romancing the other for a decent amount of time, they proceed
to ask for favours regarding money. In some cases they contact you and then
once they feel the receiver is hooked and has caught feelings, they will
disappear. Not long after they disappear, they reappear only to tell you that they’ve
been in a accident and are in desperate need of financial help. There have been
countless situations that someone popular on the web has been contacted by
multiple people that claim their images were used to impersonate them and that they
sent money to them. People can be very manipulated when it comes to emotional play
of words. Both of these scam examples are related to guilt tripping and
psychologically manipulating the receiver to trust the sender. Catfishing is
commonly used to gain something from someone. It is important to never trust
someone with your banking info until you have met them in person or they provide sufficient evidence that they are
real.
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