Catfish

Catfish is a really interesting documentary that teaches the importance of being weary of people that you meet on the internet. It shows how easily that a person can be tricked over the internet. In the documentary, Nev gets into a long distance relationship with a family he has never met before. It starts out normally enough as friends, but then he gets into a romantic relationship with one of the family members. He keeps up with what she and her friends were doing online through social media. Eventually, he finds out that almost everything he was told was a lie and that this family was not even close to what he saw online. And he finds out that the person he was chatting with online was not actually who she said she was.

Thankfully, the person who was “catfishing” Nev did not do it with malicious intent. She was only a lonely wife and painter who was having a rough family life. But not everyone has the same intentions that she did. I have seen several tales online about people getting catfished and most of the time it does not go well. Some people had their money stolen, others had gotten humiliated by an online troll, and much worse. It’s really easy to make up a fake emails, fake Facebook accounts and make entire fake identities online. It really makes me think about how cautious a person needs to be online.

While it may have been harder to do back in 2010, nowadays it a lot easier to fact check someone online. There are tons of ways to look up information that can help you notice scams and reverse image searching allows a person to check photos. Even with all this information available, it is still fairly easy to be catfished online. Some people just have nothing better to do than scam people online. That is why you should always be careful whenever you meet someone over the internet.