The 30-Year Catfish: How to Spot the Man Pretending to Be a Woman

Master was online before the internet was really the internet, more than thirty years ago. And he tells me that even then, in the old chat rooms, you were never quite sure who you were talking to. Half the time the pretty girl in the channel was running on pre-written lines, and if you typed something off-script, she fell apart. The other half of the time, she was a man.

That has not changed. The technology got better, the bots got better, but the oldest trick on the internet is still running. Men pretending to be women. And in the last two weeks, looking for couple friends on Bumble and Feeld, it happened to us twice.

Couple number one: the travelers

The first profile was a young woman in Nanaimo with an older boyfriend, a big age gap just like Master and me. Almost all the photos were of her. We started chatting about the book, she said she was sub-ish, they traveled a lot. Promising, until it wasn't.

"Traveling is a red flag." — Master

Traveling is the perfect excuse for never being available. Her boyfriend was conveniently a Montreal screenwriter with a New York agent, mirroring our life a little too neatly, and her phone number was from Toronto. Every time I asked a simple question, what is your job, where do you actually live, the answer dissolved. They had lived together three years, but she could not name a city. That is not a shy girl. That is a man who has not thought through his own story.

Couple number two: the same photo

The second one ended even faster. Well-maintained, sugar-baby-looking, no photos of the boyfriend, and a bio with no emojis and nothing remotely feminine in it. Pilates, sushi, her boyfriend likes rock and roll. Then the tell.

"She sent me the same photo she had on her Bumble profile." — Marian

When I send a new person a quick, real selfie and they reply with the exact image already on their profile, that is because it is the only picture of "her" they have. From there the flags piled up. The boyfriend was an investor and a musician. Band practice three nights a week, but somehow totally free and flexible. Home by nine, but she wakes me up at eleven. She picked the restaurants every escort in Vancouver knows. And the whole conversation was my boyfriend, my boyfriend, my boyfriend.

"This girl had zero identity." — Marian

It ended when she told me we were "looking for something kinky" and they weren't into that. I just laughed, because we already knew it was a guy.

Why it is almost always a man

Here is the part that is actually a little sad, and that Master understands from the inside, because he admits he did it himself back in the day.

"It's play pretend. I'm a girl, I pretend I'm a girl, I'm talking to people, and it's fine." — Master

A man alone gets no attention online. A man pretending to be a woman gets a flood of it. It is the same reason a lonely guy at a bar ends up talking to the bartender instead of anyone else. Most of these catfish are not trying to scam you out of money and were not even asking me for photos. They are married, older, a little stuck, and this is a low-stakes way to live a fantasy without blowing up their actual life. As Master puts it, it is always a guy interacting with another guy. That is just the internet.

The red flags, in one list

If you are out there looking for real people, keep these handy. They caught both of ours:

Replies with the same photo from their profile when you ask for a fresh selfie
"Traveling" or "busy this week" while living three kilometers away
No job, no straight answer about what they actually do, no real address
A bio that is all "my boyfriend" and no personal identity
"Investor," crypto, or a vague musician partner
No Instagram or any social footprint in 2026
Suggests the restaurants known for exactly one kind of clientele

The honest fix for all of it is the same: meet quickly. Texting hides everything, and the longer it drags, the more room there is to pretend. Real people show up. The rest suddenly have to travel.

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