If you’ve never heard the term before, “catfishing” is when someone online uses false information, and maybe even a false identity, to try and secure some sort of romantic connection with someone else.
Basically, it’s lying, and it’s become so rampant in today’s online world that there’s even an entire television show dedicated to outing those people pretending to be someone they’re not.
Usually in those cases, the person who is being catfished doesn’t actually know the catfisher in real life. But when one girl found out she’d been deceived on Tinder, she was shocked to discover the catfisher was none other than her own brother.
The brother recently shared the story of his *catfishery* online in an attempt to see whether he’d been right to trick his younger sister.
Posted in the subreddit r/AmITheAsshole, he began by explaining that his sister is 17 years old, and has no business being on the hook-up app Tinder, which requires its users to be at least 18.
When he discovered she was actively “swiping” and messaging men in their area, he demanded to know why, but she simply responded that it was “none of [his] business.”
The brother decided that he needed to find out for himself whether his sister was just swiping for fun, or if she was actually meeting up with these guys.
He also wanted to “teach her a lesson”, and said he was going to “have fun with it”, so he made his own Tinder account using a fake name (Jim), fake age (22), and a photo of one of his college friends who just so happens to be a male model.
Once he came across his sister’s profile on the app, he was able to see that she was falsely claiming to be 19 and became even more suspicious of her intentions on there.
But rather than just look at her profile, he went one step further and “superliked” his own sister.
That way, she’d instantly get a notification telling her that “Jim” was interested, and she’d be able to decide for herself whether she was interested in “Jim”, too.
It certainly seemed the fake profile he’d created had done the trick. As he recalled , “Less than an hour later, she matched AND messaged me.”
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The pair began chatting back and forth on the app, with the sister unaware that “Jim” was really her older brother.
Eventually, he set the “bait” that would really put his catfish scheme into motion:
“I decided to set up a date to a fancy restaurant downtown for Sunday afternoon and told her we could ‘head to my place afterwards’. She was completely receptive and said she’d meet me there.”
Before heading out to meet his sister for their…*date*, the brother did what he probably should have done in the beginning and told his parents what was going on.
His father decided to accompany him to the restaurant where the pair confronted his sister together, revealing that her Tinder date was actually her own brother.
“I told her that there was no Jim and that it was f***ing stupid of her to be trying to meet grown men on Tinder at her age. My dad harped onto that and lectured her on lying and meeting strange men on the Internet, and being so willing to go back to a stranger’s place.”
The brother has since triumphantly shared his catfishing story with his friends, but has received mixed responses from them.
While his male friends enjoyed his tale of deciet and even applauded him for “teaching [his] sister a lesson”, his female friends have shamed him for his tactics and told him he should have never tricked her.
So he posed the question to the people of Reddit: was he being an asshole when he catfished his own sister on Tinder?
For many people, the answer was not so surprisingly, “yes”.
People were severely unimpressed that he decided to humiliate his sister in a public setting, but also that he’d waited until the end of his catfishing scheme to tell his parents what was going on.
As this user wrote, “You should have gone straight to your parents and let them deal with it but instead, you chose the nuclear option.”
Others pointed out that the brother even said he wanted to “have fun with” deceiving his sister on the app.
“You weren’t doing this to teach her a lesson,’ you were doing this because you wanted to have fun at her expense,” one person accused.
Another summed it up perfectly when they said,
“There is a difference between wanting to keep your sister safe and wanting to embarrass her. You could have had a conversation one-on-one to talk about why using Tinder maybe isn’t the best thing at that time for her, both for her own safety and for the legal aged men who use it… Instead, you trapped her, embarrassed her publicly, and also got her hopes up for a date with some male model.”
While some pointed out the sister was also wrong for pretending to be older than she actually is on the app, they still believe her brother’s actions may have ruined their relationship.
As this person wrote,
“So cool. You taught her a lesson. Even if she’s not an ‘adult’, she’s not a child either and she will remember this. You have probably irreversibly damaged or even ruined your relationship with your sister, and have likely done the same with the relationship between your sister and your parents.”
After hearing all of Reddit’s complaints against him, the brother has since shared an update agreeing that yes, he was the asshole in this situation.
“But,” he continued, “I’m [the asshole] she needed. If anything, she knows not to be a complete moron when finding people to hook-up with on tinder.”
What do you think of this situation? Was the brother right to trick his sister, or could he gone about things differently? Let us know!
h/t: Reddit