Is "Catfishing" a Crime?

Within “Catfish”, Angela managed to create multiple people, who she pretended to be in order to fool Nev into thinking Megan was a real person. However, Megan didn’t turn out to be whom Nev thought she was. I’m surprised she managed to pull all of it off so smoothly, because I personally think catfishing someone would be incredibly hard to get away with in 2017. Every is so conditioned now to immediately do reconnaissance work on anyone they meet that I find it to probably be difficult to achieve the level of credibility needed on one’s social media page to be taken seriously. Also, people are much more aware of those who “catfish” now.

Still, the one thing that I don’t completely understand after watching this documentary is why someone would want to do this in the first place. I could guess and say it’s because the reality that they create for themselves online is much better than the one that they’re living, but it can still become tricky. For instance, the “catfisher” a lot of the time falls in love with the person they’re fooling, but they know that they can never be together because they’re actually living a lie. Do they feel a rush because they know they’re deceiving the other person? Are they trying to prove a point by that their personality is what made the opposite party attracted to them? Or what if they’re looking to harm or get revenge on the other person, so they create this fake persona in order to retrieve information? I have no idea, but in the end it never turns out well.

My final question is, should this be a crime? Maybe it already is a crime, I don't know. If you’re using someone else’s name and/or photos, though, that’s a form of identity theft. Bad things may not have happened, but what if it had? You are completely responsible for whether or not that person, who’s name you stole, gets injured, attacked, etc. because their identity was taken and used elsewhere.  Overall, this seems very illegal, but I’d be interested to know if this is still an ongoing problem.