Real Encounters

*Someone used my whole group of friends to Catfish people*

This happened about 3 years ago when I was 18. My housemate and best friend at the time (we will call him R) was browsing Facebook when he came across a profile with his picture and a name that was not his. He noticed this fake profile had stated they were from our area (Australia), and was in a relationship with some girl from America (we’ll call her J).

So R decides to add J and tell her that he was the real person from the picture and that she was in an online relationship with a fake profile. J doesn’t quite believe R because the fake profile had more friends than R and somehow seemed more legitimate, so he offers to video chat with her to prove it.

They get on Skype with each other and she is shocked to find out she was being catfished by this fake profile. I was home at the time and R calls me over while he’s still on Skype. As soon as J sees me her face goes pale and she sends a link through to another fake profile with my picture. Apparently mine and R’s fakes were previously engaged with 2 children. Upon doing some further research we discovered some scary stuff.

We found about 20 more fake profiles, all of our close and extended group of friends. All of these profiles were active and were posting the exact same statuses as we all were. It was like a fake community of all our friends, they all interacted with each other and posted regularly, copying and pasting every single one of our statuses to post on their profiles.

We thought this was really weird, but the most frightening part was that they knew exactly where we were at all times, even if we hadn’t posted about it. Me and R went to Dreamworld one day, hadn’t posted about it, hadn’t told anyone we were going, and there on our fake profiles was a status saying how much fun we were having, tagged at dreamworld. That was just one example of the several creepy statuses posted about our location. It was then that we realised that whoever this person was, was following us.

This continued for a few weeks. We tried calling the police but predictably, they couldn’t do anything. We tried in vain to contact Facebook and get the profiles deleted. We started to get scared and tried to work out who this person was, they had to have most of us as friends on Facebook because a lot of us were private, and they couldn’t have seen our statuses unless they were friends with us. No luck. We couldn’t work out who it was. We were terrified. This person was following us, and posting our whereabouts when we had told no one.

One day, it all just stopped. The profiles were gone. We never figured out who it was, and the whole thing remains unsolved. It was a really weird experience for both of us.