Flora Gill Why I used fake profiles to trick people online - YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Sign in Welcome!Log into your account Forgot your password? Password recovery Recover your password Search Sign in Welcome! Log into your account Forgot your password? Get help Password recovery Recover your password A password will be e-mailed to you. YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Home Life Flora Gill Why I used fake profiles to trick people online By You Magazine - July 18, 2021 Journalist Flora Gill was investigating the growing trend of ‘catfishing’ – where couples hoodwink unsuspecting singles to rev up their relationships. Prepare to be surprised by what she discovered. My friend Leah called me in a panic. She had been on a dating app, swiping through the faces, when a familiar one appeared. It was our friend Olive’s boyfriend Ned (although his name had been changed to the fancier-sounding ‘Nicolai’). Ned and Olive have been together for three years and we’d always thought he was a kind, sweet man – but here he was looking for hook-ups behind her back. We made the decision to call Olive. It was going to be an uncomfortable conversation, especially as at the time, due to lockdown, Ned would be at Olive’s house. We broke the news as delicately as we could. ‘You’ve met Nicolai,’ she replied joyously. ‘That’s so funny!’ Turns out she and Ned had cooked up the fake dating profile together. Bored on lockdown evenings, they’d cuddle up on the sofa swiping through girls and sending chat-up lines as the enticing Nicolai. ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘It’s fun,’ Olive replied. ‘We get to have flirty banter with strangers plus I enjoy seeing all the girls who want my boyfriend.’ There have always been questions about how genuine people are on dating apps. There are those who embellish their profiles in the same way you might do a CV. But there are also people, known as ‘catfish’, who create entirely fictitious accounts using other people’s images as their own. The exact percentage of fake profiles isn’t available as, unsurprisingly, those doing it aren’t exactly forthcoming. But last year a survey by the trade association UK Finance warned that 33 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women had reported being catfished – with 26 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women being asked for money. Catfishing couples, however, seem to be searching for sexual thrills rather than financial gain. John – half of one couple who agreed to talk to me about their catfishing – sees it as a form of foreplay. He and his girlfriend created fake profiles and enjoyed seeing who got more interest from strangers. ‘We’d go on the dating app in bed together,’ he tells me. ‘We’d make each other jealous and it would end in amazing sex. Once we even used the names [in sexual role play] of the people we’d seen [on the app].’ Dating apps saw a surge in activity over lockdown. Tinder recorded its highest number of swipes on a single day – three billion worldwide – just as lockdown began in March 2020. It also saw 12 per cent more messages being sent in the UK between mid-February and the end of March. As a millennial, dating apps have been an integral part of the dating scene for my generation, entirely changing the romantic landscape. When I was 18 it was considered odd to meet a partner online. Now it is odd to have not been on a dating site. There’s sometimes an assumption from older generations that dating apps are only used for casual hook-ups by a certain type of person, but research by dating platform eHarmony and the Imperial College Business School estimates that by 2035 more than 50 per cent of relationships in the UK will have begun online and that by 2037 the majority of babies will be born to parents who met online. I, however, met my boyfriend when I was 20. We went on our first date at the beginning of 2011 – Tinder wasn’t launched until September 2012. We’ve been together ever since, so I missed something that has become defining to the culture of my age. This is why I decided to follow in my friend’s footsteps and go couples’ catfishing. At first, I didn’t want to use our real faces or names so I used another app called Facetune to morph a photo of me into a male version. We called him Chris and started swiping through the profiles of women who responded. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing but it turns out I am not a desirable man – Chris got very few matches. So we went a step further and made profiles with our own photos but fake names. Creating our faux selves was thrilling at first. We scrolled through our photos, pulling out the best pictures of each other and writing our bios together, embellishing each other’s positive features. It was exactly like role play. I was single girl Sam, a year younger than I really am, who liked cats. I put together my boyfriend’s page, carefully cropping my face out of our photos. I felt rather proud of his profile. ‘I’d date you!’ I said. ‘I should hope so,’ he replied. We started swiping and getting responses, offering up some truly awful chat-up lines in the process. But it didn’t take long for my feelings of excitement to start morphing into something uncomfortable. I didn’t experience John’s thrill of the competition nor Olive’s joy of watching other people thirst after your partner. Instead I felt nervous. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always felt paralysingly uncomfortable lying, or maybe that’s too generous and, really, I just hated my boyfriend being lusted over by strangers. Gurpreet Singh, a counsellor at Relate, believes couples who catfish together are indulging in an unkind form of power play. He is concerned by the potential psychological impact on the victim of the deception. ‘Every relationship counsellor these days has worked with someone who’s struggled with dating websites. Now imagine how damaging it could be for someone to find out they were being played.’ He adds that there are issues of consent as well. If a couple wants to indulge in consensual sexual activity online, then there are swingers’ sites and threesome apps that will allow them to do this. Before writing this, I sent a message confessing to what I had done to all the men and women I’d matched with on the dating site. I told them I had a boyfriend and asked them what they thought of couples pretending to be single. About half of them deleted me immediately, a few said it didn’t bother them but some, quite rightly, were very upset. ‘I feel betrayed and humiliated,’ one told me. ‘It’s like I’ve been toyed with. And doing that during lockdown, when people are already struggling socially, is cruel.’ Thinking about it, couples pretending to be a single person is a bit like someone pretending to be a doctor. It’s fine to role play on your own, but when you start involving other unaware people you risk someone getting seriously hurt. The new language of love Charlotte Vossen lists the other additions to the dating dictionary. Astrolove Looking to the stars to find love, singles add their zodiac signs to their dating profiles to search for matches with astrological compatibility. New dawn daters Those who are newly single after breaking up with a long-term partner during the pandemic and may not have experienced online dating before. Loc-dating Due to lockdowns and Covid-related travel concerns, people are reducing the radius for matches on their dating profiles to as little as one mile. Honesty bombing To speed up the dating process, singles are being more upfront about who they are and what they want from a relationship. RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR Everything we know about The Crown season 5 Aldi s exercise equipment is on sale with up to 50% off The best Halloween events for 2022 across the UK Popular in Life The You magazine team reveal their New Year s resolutions December 31, 2021 Susannah Taylor The TLC tools your body will love January 23, 2022 How to stop living in fear February 6, 2022 Susannah Taylor My pick of the fittest leggings February 27, 2022 Women’ s Prize for Fiction 2022 winner announced June 17, 2022 These BBC dramas are returning for a second series June 30, 2022 Susannah Taylor gives the lowdown on nature s little helper – CBD April 17, 2022 The baby names that are banned across the world April 27, 2022 The Queen has released her own emojis May 26, 2022 Sally Brompton horoscopes 27th June-3rd July 2022 June 26, 2022 Popular CategoriesFood2704Life2496Fashion2240Beauty1738Celebrity1261Interiors684 Sign up for YOUMail Thanks for subscribing Please check your email to confirm (If you don't see the email, check the spam box) Fashion Beauty Celebrity Life Food Privacy & Cookies T&C Copyright 2022 - YOU Magazine. All Rights Reserved