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I graduated high school in 2007 so not necessarily catfish people- but there was a chaotic evil of three way calling someone and not telling them the third person was on the line and goading them into talking shit about the silent friend. Not sure if I’m making sense, along the lines of let’s call Sarah tell her that I heard she was mad at me and I want to listen to what she says.
I was a victim to an MSN version of a traditional three way call cruel prank in 2006.
A group of girls were at someone's house, and she jumped onto MSN and was trying to bait me into saying nasty things about the rest of the group, making out like she was at home alone. I had an inkling about what was going on and refused to say anything, but I should have been smart enough to not even engage.
They ended up using something completely irrelevant outside of context (I think I was talking about my favourite band and apparently that was a dig at one of the girls who hated that band??) as proof I was a "two faced snake" and kicked me out of the friendship group. I went to sit with them the next day and they all got up and sat at a different table.
They could have just kicked me out anyway if they all felt the same way and didn't want me around, the "three way MSN" convo was just a chance to be mean.
Oh that shit happened to me in the 4th or 5th grade (waaay before 2007 though lol). I wasn't saying a lot, so the friend I was "talking to" started saying shitty stuff about the friend that "wasn't there" and I agreed with her to be agreeable. That went on for several minutes until the friend that "wasn't there" suddenly spoke up and I didn't even know what to do. Made me feel sick. I still remember that sinking feeling and despair. I didn't have a lot of friends, so walking into that trap was devastating.
I remember catfishing strangers on the internet in 2002 or so, finding randos in adult AOL chatrooms and doing the whole A/S/L and then singling someone out to solo chat. It was a complete fiction, we made up ridiculous stories, and we sexted. We were 12-13 at the time. We thought it was hilarious. I don't know why, probably just because we knew it was "naughty." And we grew bored with that quickly. Honestly, it seemed then and still seems quite harmless just because there was no way in hell we were ever going to meet up or ask anyone to meet us. It was like going on that chat roulette thing without cameras.
Separately, I got catfished by my high school bully who pretended she was her own cousin, tried to trap me into shit-talking her, pulled the mean girls thing where she complimented me as a dancer and when I said "thank you" she said "so you think you're a good dancer?" This was a few years before the movie too so she was just a natural lol. Eventually she revealed herself, I guess she got bored or something. The early 00s internet was a wild time.
We also talked to randos on the internet and made things up but I’ve always kinda assumed the person on the other end was doing the same thing. I think it’s pretty hilarious looking back on it bc it was just a bunch of people role playing and lying to each other(probably).
Back when I was 11/12, so like 1998/99. I roamed the Yahoo chats like a prostitute walking the deuce in 1978.
There was no limit to my debauchery. Who was I talking to? Fuck if I know. I was always definitely 18+ and DTF.
I don't think I was fooling anyone though... These guys would ask me if I was wet and the best answer I could give back was "yes, I just got out of the shower."
That was back when the Yahoo chats were the Wild West and before Chris Hansen took out his fishing rod though. They probably had a whole division to catch the people who were talking to me.
Close friends or family though, no no. I wasn't out to hurt or fuck with anyone I actually knew. This was only something that I knew about as a horny preteen.
I used to do this on AOL too. Sometimes with my best friend, mostly alone. I was *fascinated* by it. I had no way of accessing adult material so chat rooms were my version of finding a stack of Playboys in the woods. Like you, they had to know I was a child because I never had anything to reply to their cyber role plays. “I’m rock hard, what are you gonna do about it?” “ok”
I think about it all the time. They were either pedophiles to begin with or I made dozens of men unwitting pedos.
I would definitely liken it to the same thing. Especially because it's not like you could just sit there and wait 30 minutes for pictures to download. It's funny how I think about it now and have fond memories.
My best friend and I were 18/f/cali every weekend on the living room (!!!!) family computers after parents went to bed, but I never did it alone bc I was too scared lol.
The very last time, we decided to really fuck with them and at the end admitted “I’m actually 12/f lol” and this mfr responded “lol im 14/f omg”
We screamed because we’d got got at our own game and then had the unspoken realization that all these 21/m/nyc were probably also horny kids 😭😭😭
Nope, all my close gal pals were anime/video game dorks like I was. 🤣 We wrote cringe fanfic and had crushes on fictional guys, lmao! Can't forget the major cringe of early Gaia Online...and MySpace. 🫣
Oh, I know, we just weren't into guys or anyone really. 😂 Late bloomers and as far as I'm aware, we still don't care much for guys...lmao. 😹 We just never had the thought to mess with people since those ideas never crossed any of our minds.
Edit - I guess we were the dorks that thought highly of all adults and we definitely held each other to high standards in regards to not being butts to strangers...to each other is fine. 🤣 I still hold my close friends to high standards even more now since we're all in our 30s. 👍
We weren't into these guys at all, it was just a game to us. They'd try to hit on us in chat rooms and it was fun to mess with them. No idea if they were also kids lying about their ages or actual adults.
Fair enough, I guess since I was bullied for being the quiet and goody goody gal in ms...I had trauma and didn't wanna put anyone through that. I just wanted to escape into Neopets or video games.
My friends and I routinely read and contributed fanfic on Mugglenet and Fanfiction! I tried my hand at writing a 25-chapter HP Ron/Hermione love story. I think I stopped at the 8th chapter because life got in the way. I was better at writing “one shots” and got a big adrenaline rush whenever anyone commented on what I wrote!
Not the late 2000s. When my friends first got AOL (so 1997/98?), we attempted to catfish guys. I wonder how many guys thought they were so lucky to meet an 18F blonde from California? We were all just middle school goons looking for attention. I guess it was never evil, but we shouldn't have been doing it. It was the Wild West still.
Don't worry, "karma" got me and I was cat fished and groomed by an older man from a neighboring county.
Omg yes me and my cousin were always 18/f/CA — even tho we were in the Midwest lmao. And we were maybe 12-14? We would go into AOL chatrooms. But I wonder if we were talking to actual adult men or like other 12 year old kids lol
Haha omg prolly!!! And we would “cyber” which was short for “cyber sex” I duno if I’m even spelling that correctly. But we would say the weirdest and dumbest shit. One time we must’ve been talking to an adult bc he said some nasty things, we said some nasty things, then we said something kinda dumb that no adult would ever say and they ghosted us lol.
That's it! That's the coolest format. Idk how I forgot asl. That was the first question. asl? Lol, no one wanted to talk to a bunch of dorky girls from Terre Haute, Indiana.
We probably were all just a bunch of preteens/teens thinking we were meeting older hotties of the opposite sex who just so happened to not have social lives either.
My friends and I made a fake profile of a woman on myspace, just to catfish and troll one person, but it ended up turning into dozens of different guys from our school getting cat fished by this profile because we were not expecting so many guys to start messaging her. lol
What started out as something intended to mess with one person, turned into something way bigger, and word got around that she was fake, eventually, and a lot of people wanted to fight us but we kept denying any involvement. This fake woman still gets brought up years later, and a lot of people are still not quite sure if she was real or a prank. lol It pissed off so many people that we just kept our mouth shut and never took credit. lol
Damn, a grown adult could have (through no fault of their own) gotten Catfished into a felony of some sort. Society still doesn't have a good way of dealing with such a situation, unfortunately.
Anyway, two points: 1) No one deserves to be groomed, even kids who are assholes. 2) I know it cringes to look back at yourself, but that's a good thing! It indicates progress. There are some people who could look back at the horrible things they did and just dgaf; they have no empathy or personal growth.
It's not a felony if they think they're talking to an adult, but certain judges haven't cared about that in the past because of being corrupt. I've been the young adult who has almost been on the receiving end of something worse in the past and a couple years beforehand had some creepy person ask for nudes of me when I was a few months away from being 18.
It's a dangerous position to be in. Imagine you think you're talking to an adult then the conversation gets sexual. You send a sexually explicit pic to what you've been deceived into thinking is a consenting adult. Even if you're exonerated (granted the judge doesn't suck, which you already mentioned) that's still a charge that is hard to shake off.
Or they send you a pic. Women get lighter charges because I know one who only got a week in jail for sending nudes to a teen boy when she was twice my age.
The internet in the 2000s was like the wild wild west. Absolutely my friends and I did stuff that we, rightly so, have never spoken of again and WILL NEVER speak of again
Listen we are all better for it honestly. It’s why we don’t trust a single thing posted on the internet or sent to our Yahoo mailbox.
Meanwhile everyone else thinks TikTok is gospel
My so-called friends did terrible things over the phone instead.. to me and I’d presume to others as well. You have to find some peace with it so you can move forward whether that’s unpacking what you’ve done in therapy or just forgiving yourself it’s up to you decide
My male friends and I did hang around in adult chatrooms too, mostly posing as women to get horny dudes to embarrass themselves. It's why "there are no girls on the internet" rang true to me for a very long time.
My best friend and I set out on a mission to catfish a guy who was so mean to us at school. He fell in love with the girl we created…but we used our own personalities to prove a point that he was just mean because we weren’t cute. Then said girl vanished and his heart was sad and that probably wasn’t the best idea or our proudest but fuck that bullying asshole.
Oh lord, we did something similar too. A guy had cheated on our friend and dumped her so we created a catfish account and made him go a bunch of places to meet up with her so we could stand him up repeatedly.
We used to pretend to be Aaron Carter and we had so many girls believing us. We built a whole friend group around him and it lasted for a long time. Finally some girl accused us of being a poser because Aaron was doing a concert at the exact moment we were in the chat lol
My best friend and I had a burn book of our own after watching Mean Girls. We actually put a lot of time into it, and if it had gotten out to the school, I imagine it would have been real life Mean Girls. My mom found it and literally burned it in our fireplace.
Yes. Catfished my best friend's sister.
I think us invisible girlies with low self esteem felt very powerful when we realized we could be anybody we wanted online. I know my parents worried about me talking to strangers lying about who they are but I don't think it ever crossed their mind that we'd be the ones doing it. There just wasn't much dialogue about this kind of stuff back then.
I honestly have a shitload of trauma from cyber bullying that occurred from 2001-2004. The worst part was that a lot of it came from supposed "best friends". I mostly keep to myself these days and it's kind of lonely, but also super peaceful.
I was catfished by a group of girls from my school pretending to be a boy online, beginning of grade 8. They befriended me through Piczo and Habbo Hotel and eventually we were talking nightly on MSN. I thought I was online dating a boy from another province.
After a few weeks they printed our MSN chatlogs and brought them to school, not anything sexual but just really personal issues - the school made me go through an "internet safety" course and basically said it was my fault for talking to people online. The bullying got so bad I was pulled out of gym class, and then put into the alternative portable to do my other classes because they couldn't stop kids from passing me dirty notes about my home life.
I know which 4 girls it was, 3 of them were always mean but one girl I really thought was my friend.
Not evil shit necessarily but definitely talking to people we shouldn’t have been. Especially early in high school.
I started middle school in 1998 and from them on, AIM was our lifeblood. I was suspended from my softball team for a game along with 2 of my friends after getting caught messaging a girl from another team, “you suck!” Lol.
I used to troll a poetry forum with intentionally bad poems to be critiqued because I was credentialed with having been published in a poetry contest, which made me sound serious.
I’m pretty sure some of my bullies from middle/jr. high school made fake myspace pages of me and a friend to bully us. Idk for sure because I wasn’t allowed to have a myspace but I heard rumors.
My buddies and I used to catfish creepy dudes for fun... Howling laughter. Mostly harmless (to us!) since these dudes were well aware we were young and were sketchy anyway.
In all likelihood they were other groups of male junior HS kids fucking with us.
No intentional bullying or torturing anyone though. And no deception aimed at anyone we knew irl (look the acronyms are returning already!)
Me and my bestie did that all the time in middle school. Fake names, stolen photos of random people, fake everything. This was around 1999-2001. My friend even got a guy to send her gifts from a wishlist. We'd lure adult men into chats with us under the pretense of sexting with teenagers (I forget what age we claimed to be) but would then get extremely focused on every little detail. Like one time the guy wanted to do something with us on a couch. So we say before we can start, we have to properly set the scene. That meant asking what kind of couch, what color, how many pillows on it, what's the layout of the rest of the room, is there a carpet, etc etc. We'd keep it up until they got frustrated enough to leave, though amazingly some continued to message us hoping that eventually there'd be no more details left to discuss and the sex could finally begin. No sexting ever occurred. It was hilarious.
I can't speak to it being commonplace or not but I was definitely out on roleplay chatrooms pretending to be things I wasn't. My friends and I would def chat with people and we were basically trolling before that was a term we were familiar with. As a socially awkward kid in the late 90s/early 00s I was online a lot and on all kinds of forums.
Part of me is glad all the shenanigans I got up to have all but disappeared from the Internet. As curious as I would be to revisit some of the nonsense from those days, I can't imagine having all the shit I was doing being traced back to my real identity. That sounds like a terrible unfree way to grow up. Mind neither I nor my friends were doing anything *malicious* per se, but we were def having what today would be considered age-inappropriate conversations with strangers.
I do kind of miss the wild West the Internet was then, all the sites people would make, the chaotic designs, banners, general wackiness of it all. I think as much as we want to protect children, the depravity online has instead taken a very serious and very dark turn and in the process of institutionalizing all the interaction we lost something really special that used to exist.
I said games *like* club penguin. I did more bullying on AIM as well, MySpace, but the memories were 17-18 years ago and I’m not exactly remembering what all I did. Edit I also used to make alt profiles on sites like that usually opposite gender just to fuck around and flirt with people 🤣
There was a falling out between two of the girls in my friend group because one of them hypothetically "stole" the other's hypothetical baby names. In retaliation the one whose names were stolen created and distributed a website claiming that the thief was a pedophile.
My buddies and I used to use my parents computer that had a program where we could make out going calls without the house number showing on the caller ID and *69 didn't work. It was the best part of the dial up modems. We used the prank call people for hours.
Worst we ever did was fill up someomes Hotmail Inbox with 100k emails. Multiple times. There was no option to "select all" so they had to abandon the account and start over.
Back then there were no DDOS protections so you could also reverse lookup an IP from a chat and swamp the connection. If I remember correctly, some IPs would even terminate the other person's dialup connection, so they'd have to go through the process of reconnecting. Fun times for sure and mostly harmless.
My buddies and I had a stretch of vandalism in middle school (99-02). It wasn’t often, but we grew tired of being locked in the house during sleepovers. So we’d prowl the night around each other neighborhoods. This included pissing on car doors, moving stuff around in yards, throwing food at houses. It was juvenile bullshit that I certainly regret. You’re not alone in that regard.
I’m so thankful I found weed the summer going into HS. Perhaps it fucked me up in some ways developmentally. However, it calmed me the fuck down. It honestly probably saved me from doing some really stupid shit. We’d still prowl the night while getting high, but no where near as destructive. No time to destroy when I’m busy contemplating my existence.
P.s. learning about so many of you being part of a catfish scheme is making me doubt the authenticity of my online HS GF Michele Munt from Fresno, CA. I had no idea this was a regular activity for my peers. I thought I only had to look out for pedophiles. 😅😭
Yes... I'm not going to admit to most of the fucked up things I did. But I will share that when I was twelve and thirteen in the late 90s I, a girl, used to hang out in a particular member created AOL chat room where older men looked for younger men. I didn't really lie about my age but I lied about my gender / sex. My "big sister", aka older best friend, got a lot of checks from pedos. We always split it. Oh, and I dropped my first girlfriends land line phone number in the 'phone sex' private AOL chat on more than one occasion. Don't really feel guilty about either of those..
No but one of my friends who is also a Zillennial (but a few years younger) said that he had done some questionable things on the internet in the early 2010s, so also middle school
Oh definitely. I look back and I cringe. We were making countless screen names and going into aol chat rooms to talk to randos, we always said we were 21/f. And sending them pics we found on google, making up all sorts of random stuff. We were 11-13. We also would meet teenage boys from other school districts at movie theaters/car shows/county fairs and get their screen names, we couldn’t lie too much about our age but we would tell them the craziest stuff online knowing we probably wouldn’t run into them in person again. Very risky behavior for that age, and also very cringe.
It was 1995 and there were very early adopters of hotmail. You could literally go into anyone account by going into history. Plus me and my friend installed a key logger on the freshly installed library computers as there was system admin was a unknown thing in most places. We knew which teachers were watching kinky stuff on the school computers.
I was in college in the late naughties.
And uhm we mostly just made out in my lesbian friend group… we also ordered a lot of pizza and watched Hannah Montana “ironically”.
Yikes I sincerely hope your situation was uncommon.
Someone tried to catfish me when I was in high school. They tried to get me to go meet up with them which I didn't. I still don't know who it was but I have suspicions.
But your version seems really extreme. It's one thing to be vicious to someone you actually know. It sounds like you did this to total strangers, which is a whole other level of messed up.
Oh youre not alone, we used to bait pedophiles into talking to us....and we thought it was fun and games....thankfully nothing too serious came of it...
Nah we would go on Omegle and offer to show guys pictures [of our tits (safe for work lmao). ](https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-tmus-us-rvc3&sca_esv=71668abf73626b35&sca_upv=1&q=tits+birds&udm=2&fbs=AEQNm0BttMAYK3zfKuhWMlJUaX3cbd3Nw0JWQZ1U807e36hzavZycKTDzN51ABdlR9YbeRG_xWhgkvHPUZINW0-1qwx46TtH7asIdcTpVgwBa-JvjUNuq2WgoD-loDgAZiW7YQ7d-T0ySZIRyejX6FUp1yiALpC6xXofFzyM94EpCJan9n3P4Kg8648ZbJnOdLCk7WESn4DP_q0SvVFTT789h5h7UtywXw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj889nM6ZiHAxWvGTQIHfFUCBUQtKgLegQICBAB&biw=360&bih=661&dpr=3)
It was always great when they'd rage quit out of the chat after that. This one guy was actually amused and figured out we were teens and like very kindly told us we needed to be careful online.
A friend and I logged into another "friend's" neopets account. We bought a bunch of things and gifted it to our accounts. She never knew it was us. You had to play a lot of games to get coins 😅
This is why more young women need video games. If you leave them to come up with their own entertainment, this kind of cruel shit goes down.
I was always too busy trying to beat Secret of Evermore or whatever.
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I graduated high school in 2007 so not necessarily catfish people- but there was a chaotic evil of three way calling someone and not telling them the third person was on the line and goading them into talking shit about the silent friend. Not sure if I’m making sense, along the lines of let’s call Sarah tell her that I heard she was mad at me and I want to listen to what she says.
I still have trust issues stemming from three way calling.
Mean Girls *deeefinitely* knew what was up with that one scene, omg. A millennial woman rite of passage for sure.
I found out my sophomore year bf was cheating on me through three way
I was a victim to an MSN version of a traditional three way call cruel prank in 2006. A group of girls were at someone's house, and she jumped onto MSN and was trying to bait me into saying nasty things about the rest of the group, making out like she was at home alone. I had an inkling about what was going on and refused to say anything, but I should have been smart enough to not even engage. They ended up using something completely irrelevant outside of context (I think I was talking about my favourite band and apparently that was a dig at one of the girls who hated that band??) as proof I was a "two faced snake" and kicked me out of the friendship group. I went to sit with them the next day and they all got up and sat at a different table. They could have just kicked me out anyway if they all felt the same way and didn't want me around, the "three way MSN" convo was just a chance to be mean.
Mid 1990s six graders were doing that, too. It’s a past time with tweenagers!
Oh that shit happened to me in the 4th or 5th grade (waaay before 2007 though lol). I wasn't saying a lot, so the friend I was "talking to" started saying shitty stuff about the friend that "wasn't there" and I agreed with her to be agreeable. That went on for several minutes until the friend that "wasn't there" suddenly spoke up and I didn't even know what to do. Made me feel sick. I still remember that sinking feeling and despair. I didn't have a lot of friends, so walking into that trap was devastating.
Omg this was bonkers. Depending on the severity of the conversation it was essential to ask if anyone else was listening before spilling anything.
That happened in the 90s too.
I definitely went through that. ugh. it was disgusting. Also graduated in 2007, but this happened when I was in middle school a lot.
Yep I have been both the silent third caller (not my idea) and the unaware speaker.
I have to like understand this better Idk
I got caught in that once as the unknowing one. It was a brutal year of 7th grade after that
I forgot how much this was a thing!!!
My childhood best friend was catfished by her other "best friend" and I'm still not sure if she knows that to this day....
Oh wow, are they still friends today?
I honestly have no idea. We haven't talked in almost 20 years
I remember catfishing strangers on the internet in 2002 or so, finding randos in adult AOL chatrooms and doing the whole A/S/L and then singling someone out to solo chat. It was a complete fiction, we made up ridiculous stories, and we sexted. We were 12-13 at the time. We thought it was hilarious. I don't know why, probably just because we knew it was "naughty." And we grew bored with that quickly. Honestly, it seemed then and still seems quite harmless just because there was no way in hell we were ever going to meet up or ask anyone to meet us. It was like going on that chat roulette thing without cameras. Separately, I got catfished by my high school bully who pretended she was her own cousin, tried to trap me into shit-talking her, pulled the mean girls thing where she complimented me as a dancer and when I said "thank you" she said "so you think you're a good dancer?" This was a few years before the movie too so she was just a natural lol. Eventually she revealed herself, I guess she got bored or something. The early 00s internet was a wild time.
We also talked to randos on the internet and made things up but I’ve always kinda assumed the person on the other end was doing the same thing. I think it’s pretty hilarious looking back on it bc it was just a bunch of people role playing and lying to each other(probably).
We did this too. Fake pictures and all. It seemed harmless back then, it was all virtual.
Back when I was 11/12, so like 1998/99. I roamed the Yahoo chats like a prostitute walking the deuce in 1978. There was no limit to my debauchery. Who was I talking to? Fuck if I know. I was always definitely 18+ and DTF. I don't think I was fooling anyone though... These guys would ask me if I was wet and the best answer I could give back was "yes, I just got out of the shower." That was back when the Yahoo chats were the Wild West and before Chris Hansen took out his fishing rod though. They probably had a whole division to catch the people who were talking to me. Close friends or family though, no no. I wasn't out to hurt or fuck with anyone I actually knew. This was only something that I knew about as a horny preteen.
I used to do this on AOL too. Sometimes with my best friend, mostly alone. I was *fascinated* by it. I had no way of accessing adult material so chat rooms were my version of finding a stack of Playboys in the woods. Like you, they had to know I was a child because I never had anything to reply to their cyber role plays. “I’m rock hard, what are you gonna do about it?” “ok” I think about it all the time. They were either pedophiles to begin with or I made dozens of men unwitting pedos.
I would definitely liken it to the same thing. Especially because it's not like you could just sit there and wait 30 minutes for pictures to download. It's funny how I think about it now and have fond memories.
AOL chose to enable thousands of pedos because they were paying customers. Made them a fortune
My best friend and I were 18/f/cali every weekend on the living room (!!!!) family computers after parents went to bed, but I never did it alone bc I was too scared lol. The very last time, we decided to really fuck with them and at the end admitted “I’m actually 12/f lol” and this mfr responded “lol im 14/f omg” We screamed because we’d got got at our own game and then had the unspoken realization that all these 21/m/nyc were probably also horny kids 😭😭😭
Omg that's hilarious. 18/F/CA was where it was atttt. Good times.
I would do this in AOL chatrooms with my cousin! It’s so funny how this is such a common rite of passage.
Nope, all my close gal pals were anime/video game dorks like I was. 🤣 We wrote cringe fanfic and had crushes on fictional guys, lmao! Can't forget the major cringe of early Gaia Online...and MySpace. 🫣
Ah the cringe fanfics. Those were the days.
It's not mutually exclusive - my friend and I did both!
Oh, I know, we just weren't into guys or anyone really. 😂 Late bloomers and as far as I'm aware, we still don't care much for guys...lmao. 😹 We just never had the thought to mess with people since those ideas never crossed any of our minds. Edit - I guess we were the dorks that thought highly of all adults and we definitely held each other to high standards in regards to not being butts to strangers...to each other is fine. 🤣 I still hold my close friends to high standards even more now since we're all in our 30s. 👍
We weren't into these guys at all, it was just a game to us. They'd try to hit on us in chat rooms and it was fun to mess with them. No idea if they were also kids lying about their ages or actual adults.
Fair enough, I guess since I was bullied for being the quiet and goody goody gal in ms...I had trauma and didn't wanna put anyone through that. I just wanted to escape into Neopets or video games.
My friends and I routinely read and contributed fanfic on Mugglenet and Fanfiction! I tried my hand at writing a 25-chapter HP Ron/Hermione love story. I think I stopped at the 8th chapter because life got in the way. I was better at writing “one shots” and got a big adrenaline rush whenever anyone commented on what I wrote!
Not the late 2000s. When my friends first got AOL (so 1997/98?), we attempted to catfish guys. I wonder how many guys thought they were so lucky to meet an 18F blonde from California? We were all just middle school goons looking for attention. I guess it was never evil, but we shouldn't have been doing it. It was the Wild West still. Don't worry, "karma" got me and I was cat fished and groomed by an older man from a neighboring county.
Omg yes me and my cousin were always 18/f/CA — even tho we were in the Midwest lmao. And we were maybe 12-14? We would go into AOL chatrooms. But I wonder if we were talking to actual adult men or like other 12 year old kids lol
You were probably taking to me…a 12-14 yr old “18/m/NY”
Same hahaha
Haha! Love it!
Haha omg prolly!!! And we would “cyber” which was short for “cyber sex” I duno if I’m even spelling that correctly. But we would say the weirdest and dumbest shit. One time we must’ve been talking to an adult bc he said some nasty things, we said some nasty things, then we said something kinda dumb that no adult would ever say and they ghosted us lol.
That's it! That's the coolest format. Idk how I forgot asl. That was the first question. asl? Lol, no one wanted to talk to a bunch of dorky girls from Terre Haute, Indiana. We probably were all just a bunch of preteens/teens thinking we were meeting older hotties of the opposite sex who just so happened to not have social lives either.
Honestly AOL chat rooms were like the Wild West.
My male friend group used the Internet to do evil shit in the late 1990s.
My friends and I made a fake profile of a woman on myspace, just to catfish and troll one person, but it ended up turning into dozens of different guys from our school getting cat fished by this profile because we were not expecting so many guys to start messaging her. lol What started out as something intended to mess with one person, turned into something way bigger, and word got around that she was fake, eventually, and a lot of people wanted to fight us but we kept denying any involvement. This fake woman still gets brought up years later, and a lot of people are still not quite sure if she was real or a prank. lol It pissed off so many people that we just kept our mouth shut and never took credit. lol
Damn, a grown adult could have (through no fault of their own) gotten Catfished into a felony of some sort. Society still doesn't have a good way of dealing with such a situation, unfortunately. Anyway, two points: 1) No one deserves to be groomed, even kids who are assholes. 2) I know it cringes to look back at yourself, but that's a good thing! It indicates progress. There are some people who could look back at the horrible things they did and just dgaf; they have no empathy or personal growth.
It's not a felony if they think they're talking to an adult, but certain judges haven't cared about that in the past because of being corrupt. I've been the young adult who has almost been on the receiving end of something worse in the past and a couple years beforehand had some creepy person ask for nudes of me when I was a few months away from being 18.
It's a dangerous position to be in. Imagine you think you're talking to an adult then the conversation gets sexual. You send a sexually explicit pic to what you've been deceived into thinking is a consenting adult. Even if you're exonerated (granted the judge doesn't suck, which you already mentioned) that's still a charge that is hard to shake off.
Or they send you a pic. Women get lighter charges because I know one who only got a week in jail for sending nudes to a teen boy when she was twice my age.
The internet in the 2000s was like the wild wild west. Absolutely my friends and I did stuff that we, rightly so, have never spoken of again and WILL NEVER speak of again
Listen we are all better for it honestly. It’s why we don’t trust a single thing posted on the internet or sent to our Yahoo mailbox. Meanwhile everyone else thinks TikTok is gospel
My so-called friends did terrible things over the phone instead.. to me and I’d presume to others as well. You have to find some peace with it so you can move forward whether that’s unpacking what you’ve done in therapy or just forgiving yourself it’s up to you decide
[удалено]
There’s really no sense in beating yourself up and if that’s your go to that’s what needs to be addressed
My male friends and I did hang around in adult chatrooms too, mostly posing as women to get horny dudes to embarrass themselves. It's why "there are no girls on the internet" rang true to me for a very long time.
My best friend and I set out on a mission to catfish a guy who was so mean to us at school. He fell in love with the girl we created…but we used our own personalities to prove a point that he was just mean because we weren’t cute. Then said girl vanished and his heart was sad and that probably wasn’t the best idea or our proudest but fuck that bullying asshole.
Oh lord, we did something similar too. A guy had cheated on our friend and dumped her so we created a catfish account and made him go a bunch of places to meet up with her so we could stand him up repeatedly.
We used to pretend to be Aaron Carter and we had so many girls believing us. We built a whole friend group around him and it lasted for a long time. Finally some girl accused us of being a poser because Aaron was doing a concert at the exact moment we were in the chat lol
Lmao
Absolutely, yes.
My best friend and I had a burn book of our own after watching Mean Girls. We actually put a lot of time into it, and if it had gotten out to the school, I imagine it would have been real life Mean Girls. My mom found it and literally burned it in our fireplace.
Yes. Catfished my best friend's sister. I think us invisible girlies with low self esteem felt very powerful when we realized we could be anybody we wanted online. I know my parents worried about me talking to strangers lying about who they are but I don't think it ever crossed their mind that we'd be the ones doing it. There just wasn't much dialogue about this kind of stuff back then.
I honestly have a shitload of trauma from cyber bullying that occurred from 2001-2004. The worst part was that a lot of it came from supposed "best friends". I mostly keep to myself these days and it's kind of lonely, but also super peaceful.
10000%% yes I did horrible things and had horrible things done to me
I was catfished by a group of girls from my school pretending to be a boy online, beginning of grade 8. They befriended me through Piczo and Habbo Hotel and eventually we were talking nightly on MSN. I thought I was online dating a boy from another province. After a few weeks they printed our MSN chatlogs and brought them to school, not anything sexual but just really personal issues - the school made me go through an "internet safety" course and basically said it was my fault for talking to people online. The bullying got so bad I was pulled out of gym class, and then put into the alternative portable to do my other classes because they couldn't stop kids from passing me dirty notes about my home life. I know which 4 girls it was, 3 of them were always mean but one girl I really thought was my friend.
I’m very sorry this happened
omg habbo hotel brings back memories of debauchery.
This answers a lot of questions about fake facebooks that seemingly made their way around school
Not evil shit necessarily but definitely talking to people we shouldn’t have been. Especially early in high school. I started middle school in 1998 and from them on, AIM was our lifeblood. I was suspended from my softball team for a game along with 2 of my friends after getting caught messaging a girl from another team, “you suck!” Lol.
I used to troll a poetry forum with intentionally bad poems to be critiqued because I was credentialed with having been published in a poetry contest, which made me sound serious.
No. We used it to play video games, pirate movies and music and the like.
Wow, no.
Um, no.
I can't really think of any "evil" things I did back then. Definitely some very embarrassing stuff though.
I’m pretty sure some of my bullies from middle/jr. high school made fake myspace pages of me and a friend to bully us. Idk for sure because I wasn’t allowed to have a myspace but I heard rumors.
My buddies and I used to catfish creepy dudes for fun... Howling laughter. Mostly harmless (to us!) since these dudes were well aware we were young and were sketchy anyway. In all likelihood they were other groups of male junior HS kids fucking with us. No intentional bullying or torturing anyone though. And no deception aimed at anyone we knew irl (look the acronyms are returning already!)
We used to make fake screen names on AIM and harass people. We were very much not popular so it was a punching up situation I suppose.
You just described half of the evil of discovering AOL as a millennial ;)
Me and my bestie did that all the time in middle school. Fake names, stolen photos of random people, fake everything. This was around 1999-2001. My friend even got a guy to send her gifts from a wishlist. We'd lure adult men into chats with us under the pretense of sexting with teenagers (I forget what age we claimed to be) but would then get extremely focused on every little detail. Like one time the guy wanted to do something with us on a couch. So we say before we can start, we have to properly set the scene. That meant asking what kind of couch, what color, how many pillows on it, what's the layout of the rest of the room, is there a carpet, etc etc. We'd keep it up until they got frustrated enough to leave, though amazingly some continued to message us hoping that eventually there'd be no more details left to discuss and the sex could finally begin. No sexting ever occurred. It was hilarious.
I can't speak to it being commonplace or not but I was definitely out on roleplay chatrooms pretending to be things I wasn't. My friends and I would def chat with people and we were basically trolling before that was a term we were familiar with. As a socially awkward kid in the late 90s/early 00s I was online a lot and on all kinds of forums. Part of me is glad all the shenanigans I got up to have all but disappeared from the Internet. As curious as I would be to revisit some of the nonsense from those days, I can't imagine having all the shit I was doing being traced back to my real identity. That sounds like a terrible unfree way to grow up. Mind neither I nor my friends were doing anything *malicious* per se, but we were def having what today would be considered age-inappropriate conversations with strangers. I do kind of miss the wild West the Internet was then, all the sites people would make, the chaotic designs, banners, general wackiness of it all. I think as much as we want to protect children, the depravity online has instead taken a very serious and very dark turn and in the process of institutionalizing all the interaction we lost something really special that used to exist.
I think the worst thing I did with friends is bully people on games like club penguin, whatever else I used back then.
Bully people on club penguin? 😂
I said games *like* club penguin. I did more bullying on AIM as well, MySpace, but the memories were 17-18 years ago and I’m not exactly remembering what all I did. Edit I also used to make alt profiles on sites like that usually opposite gender just to fuck around and flirt with people 🤣
Pools Closed. Due to aids.
What about us girls that were the focus of your catfishing?...that was me. I haven't been able to truly trust anyone as a friend since.
There was a falling out between two of the girls in my friend group because one of them hypothetically "stole" the other's hypothetical baby names. In retaliation the one whose names were stolen created and distributed a website claiming that the thief was a pedophile.
We did this in the 90s on AOL in chat rooms, truly a universal girlhood experience
My buddies and I used to use my parents computer that had a program where we could make out going calls without the house number showing on the caller ID and *69 didn't work. It was the best part of the dial up modems. We used the prank call people for hours.
Not a girl, but me and my buddy made AIM screen names with the real names of other classmates to cat fish our friends. One was Robbie Birdsong
Worst we ever did was fill up someomes Hotmail Inbox with 100k emails. Multiple times. There was no option to "select all" so they had to abandon the account and start over. Back then there were no DDOS protections so you could also reverse lookup an IP from a chat and swamp the connection. If I remember correctly, some IPs would even terminate the other person's dialup connection, so they'd have to go through the process of reconnecting. Fun times for sure and mostly harmless.
My buddies and I had a stretch of vandalism in middle school (99-02). It wasn’t often, but we grew tired of being locked in the house during sleepovers. So we’d prowl the night around each other neighborhoods. This included pissing on car doors, moving stuff around in yards, throwing food at houses. It was juvenile bullshit that I certainly regret. You’re not alone in that regard. I’m so thankful I found weed the summer going into HS. Perhaps it fucked me up in some ways developmentally. However, it calmed me the fuck down. It honestly probably saved me from doing some really stupid shit. We’d still prowl the night while getting high, but no where near as destructive. No time to destroy when I’m busy contemplating my existence. P.s. learning about so many of you being part of a catfish scheme is making me doubt the authenticity of my online HS GF Michele Munt from Fresno, CA. I had no idea this was a regular activity for my peers. I thought I only had to look out for pedophiles. 😅😭
One of the few things I was mature enough to not participate in, may cost me making friends but I don't care about fitting in.
Yes... I'm not going to admit to most of the fucked up things I did. But I will share that when I was twelve and thirteen in the late 90s I, a girl, used to hang out in a particular member created AOL chat room where older men looked for younger men. I didn't really lie about my age but I lied about my gender / sex. My "big sister", aka older best friend, got a lot of checks from pedos. We always split it. Oh, and I dropped my first girlfriends land line phone number in the 'phone sex' private AOL chat on more than one occasion. Don't really feel guilty about either of those..
No but one of my friends who is also a Zillennial (but a few years younger) said that he had done some questionable things on the internet in the early 2010s, so also middle school
Wife and I grew up in the same town and we have never done this. Our current friends have never done this. But I have heard of it being done.
Oh definitely. I look back and I cringe. We were making countless screen names and going into aol chat rooms to talk to randos, we always said we were 21/f. And sending them pics we found on google, making up all sorts of random stuff. We were 11-13. We also would meet teenage boys from other school districts at movie theaters/car shows/county fairs and get their screen names, we couldn’t lie too much about our age but we would tell them the craziest stuff online knowing we probably wouldn’t run into them in person again. Very risky behavior for that age, and also very cringe.
Not mine. Sounds like mean girl shit.
I didn't really catfish but I would have fun shaming guys on the chat rooms for trying to lure underage girls like myself.
Yeah sounds like the girls back in high school.
Damn all I did was download porn novels.
It was 1995 and there were very early adopters of hotmail. You could literally go into anyone account by going into history. Plus me and my friend installed a key logger on the freshly installed library computers as there was system admin was a unknown thing in most places. We knew which teachers were watching kinky stuff on the school computers.
Not in grade school(as I didn't have friends then.) But in college we prank phone called guys when hanging out often
I was in college in the late naughties. And uhm we mostly just made out in my lesbian friend group… we also ordered a lot of pizza and watched Hannah Montana “ironically”.
Yikes I sincerely hope your situation was uncommon. Someone tried to catfish me when I was in high school. They tried to get me to go meet up with them which I didn't. I still don't know who it was but I have suspicions. But your version seems really extreme. It's one thing to be vicious to someone you actually know. It sounds like you did this to total strangers, which is a whole other level of messed up.
Oh youre not alone, we used to bait pedophiles into talking to us....and we thought it was fun and games....thankfully nothing too serious came of it...
Nah we would go on Omegle and offer to show guys pictures [of our tits (safe for work lmao). ](https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-tmus-us-rvc3&sca_esv=71668abf73626b35&sca_upv=1&q=tits+birds&udm=2&fbs=AEQNm0BttMAYK3zfKuhWMlJUaX3cbd3Nw0JWQZ1U807e36hzavZycKTDzN51ABdlR9YbeRG_xWhgkvHPUZINW0-1qwx46TtH7asIdcTpVgwBa-JvjUNuq2WgoD-loDgAZiW7YQ7d-T0ySZIRyejX6FUp1yiALpC6xXofFzyM94EpCJan9n3P4Kg8648ZbJnOdLCk7WESn4DP_q0SvVFTT789h5h7UtywXw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj889nM6ZiHAxWvGTQIHfFUCBUQtKgLegQICBAB&biw=360&bih=661&dpr=3) It was always great when they'd rage quit out of the chat after that. This one guy was actually amused and figured out we were teens and like very kindly told us we needed to be careful online.
A friend and I logged into another "friend's" neopets account. We bought a bunch of things and gifted it to our accounts. She never knew it was us. You had to play a lot of games to get coins 😅
Jesus wept. Some people's kids.
This is why more young women need video games. If you leave them to come up with their own entertainment, this kind of cruel shit goes down. I was always too busy trying to beat Secret of Evermore or whatever.
I was running cross country and playing soccer ☝️🤓