Have you met catfishes online? How do you judge if a person is trustworthy or not?

I actually have an acquaintance who's a narcissistic douche that has a hobby of catfishing both men and women online to boost his ego, but other than that I've never been catfished myself or know anyone who fell victim to it.

I was catfished horribly by a girl who pretended to be a guy with serious intent. She approached me with her fake persona as a young male who had an unhealthy interest in me through social media. At the time i was a fairly naive young girl seeking validation for my beauty in all the wrong places. I longed to be in a relationship over glamourized by alot of different things at the time. She played her role well because i fell into her trap and i was like a cornered mouse in the paws of a sadistic cat. To this day i still dont understand why she felt like torturing me so much. Was she actually in love with me? I kind of wanted to find out so i kept persuing her. Turns out she was just a lying psycho. She got what she wanted. A game. And to win. A year later i decided to dress like a boy and take pictures. Alot of girls and gay guys thought i was very cute. I didnt pursue any of them or fuck with them like my "ex" had done. When it got too far i stopped. Some people knew i was a girl anyway

That last part was entirely my situation Tohru, except I was moreso trying to validate who they were not if they loved me, intentions as far as I knew where bad and secondary in my pursuit. It never really payed off though, I should have just buried the situation.

そうですね...It cannot be denied that we even couldn't prove ourselves not to be catfishes╮(╯▽╰)╭. Internet, you know. I guess time will tell..Most catfishes won't play games for an extended period of time..| ू•ૅ㉨•́)ᵎᵎᵎ with one person..

Passing google image is pretty easy as long as they don't use photos of "celebrities"...Nowadays, many people enjoy posting their selfies/group photos on social media, those people may be their acquaintances online or offline, so taking advantage of those photos is possible...

By the time I even let attraction build past a certain point, I have to at least have talked to them in skype face chat or met them in real life before I could let them build any further. I've never really fallen for any cat fish I know of. Like a few people I've RPed with on Gaia for years have lied about their genders, but its not like they are trying to build relationships or anything. The red flags are just too easy to see, otherwise. How are they presenting themselves to you? Are they trying too hard to earn your trust, or trying too obviously to get something out of you? Is it too easy to get along with them? (And granted, I get along with people pretty easily, but most people at least have a few differences in opinion that they want to express.) Basically a lot of the same methods to figuring out if you are talking to a sociopath or a psychopath tend to work with catfishers and scammers as well, because even the most careful narratives people make up around themselves leave some rather blatant inconsistencies. Especially if you're talking to someone who isn't trying to take their time. So if I find out someone is real, that's usually a bigger shock to me than if they are fake. It's not like I have trust issues or anything, that's just how I am online. ^__^;

Oh huh, what do you know? I had assumed facebook and twitter images would pop up in google image searches too. I guess I was wrong.