People looking for relationships in the murky waters of cyberspace now have a new danger to watch out for this Valentine’s day… Catfish!

One month ago a catfish was, well… a fish. But now it has become a term for a phenomenon rocketed into the public consciousness by the bizarre events of the Manti Ta’o girlfriend hoax. For those outside the US who may not know what I’m talking about — Manti Ta’o is an American football player who fell in love with what he thought was an attractive young woman that he met on a social networking site. The relationship lasted for several years until Manti discovered that this “woman” who he had only communicated with online and over the phone was really a disturbed man who had created a fake online profile with a fictitious name, a made-up life, and a photograph of a woman hijacked from someone else’s profile. Manti Ta’o had been the victim of a “catfish”!

A Catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they are not online using Facebook or other social media to create a false identity, especially to lure unsuspecting people into deceptive online romances. The word “catfish” comes from the 2010 documentary Catfish about a man who, like Manti Ta’o, fell for a woman he met online based on a fabricated social media profile created by an internet predator to trick him into an  emotional/romantic relationship. (Watch the video at this link for more info on the Manti Ta’o story and the catfishing phenomenon.)

A Catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they are not online using Facebook or other social media to create a false identity.

For weeks the Manti Ta’o catfishing story dominated the news. But it wasn’t news in my opinion, and I couldn’t understand why they were making such a big deal out of it. So, a guy gets scammed on the internet by a fraud.  There are lots of frauds on the internet, and I knew that from personal experience. Surely, everyone knows you can’t trust everything you see on the internet, right?

Well, apparently lots of people didn’t know that. I was shocked by the number of people I ‘ve seen in videos across the internet that said  that they had never heard of predators with deceptive online profiles or “catfish” before. The term “catfishing” may be new, but there’s nothing new about someone trying to lure you into a relationship by pretending to be something they are not. Virgins have been dealing with catfish — or in our case — non-virgins who pretend to be Virgins just to get into our pants, since before there was an internet. There’s a lot of frustration among Virgins about people who pretend to be Virgins, and this is becoming a serious problem as Virgin adults become more visible and begin to seek out other Virgin adults for moral support, friendship, and yes… even love. But these things become very difficult to achieve when every other person that claims to be a Virgin is not, and you don’t know who to trust.

So the whole catfishing thing was not news to me — and I doubt that it was news for the majority of real Virgins who probably have their own fish stories to tell. I certainly have mine.