r/catfish • u/PortalMaker5000 • 1d ago
Red Flags or overthinking?
Hi everyone, I am looking for outside perspective on something I am dealing with. This might be a longer post.
I met someone on Instagram about 2 1/2 - 3 years ago, and have been talking to them pretty frequently since then. I will call her K for now. K’s account was pretty empty in terms of content, but they were tagged in a few posts, had the account since 2021 with only 2 handle changes, and had a decently split ratio of followers to following, about 250:370, so it didn’t seem too illegitimate despite the lack of content.
As some time went on we got closer and began talking more frequently. I learned more about her, that she was from Florida but currently living in NYC, basic info like that. I asked twice to meet her but she refused both times since we still didn’t know each other well, which makes sense since this was only a month or so into knowing each other. A little while after she ended up going back to Florida, and so far has not been back to NYC since.
At some point I remembered seeing changes happen to the account. The PFP and handle were changed, almost as if doing a clean slate. The handle changed from her first name to “***.vf”. Up until this point, that meant nothing to me because as far as I knew her name was K. One thing I found interesting though was that there was a new post, but it was a post unarchived from sometime in 2023, before I had met her. The caption mentioned K and her cousin, seemingly showing pictures of the two of them together in a mirror.
Then, back in June 2025, I asked them for their phone number, as I figured having gone this long it didn’t feel like I was being targeted for a scam. She gave it to me right away, so we started texting through there. They had an iPhone, which had tracked from the pictures they sent me. About a week into having their number, they told me that their real name wasn’t K, and that their initials came out to VF, the same initials that appeared in her IG handle about 6 months prior. They claimed that they only used their real initials with close friends / family, which is why they introduced themselves under a different name.
Fast forward to now, I had zero interactions with them that was asking me for money, help, etc. At one point I even offered to send some money via Venmo for their birthday, and the offer was still rejected. So then I got curious and looked them up on sites like TruePeopleSearch. When I looked at their number, they came up as a man's name with the initials FS. The same thing showed when I looked up the number in Zelle. So I figured I probably was being catfished, but I didn’t (and still don’t), understand what for. It didn’t make sense to me unless they wanted something. They’ve even expressed worry about me recently when I had been going out to bars / parties with friends for 4-5 days straight. In my mind, if they were looking to gain something they wouldn’t have even brought it up.
So I tried to do more digging and get more information. I tried reverse image searches through Google, Pimeye, Tineye, and Yandex on ~32 different images, ones of her and ones not necessarily of her, just stuff she was doing / her car, things of that variety. Out of all of them, only two had basically identical results on Yandex, that being one of the pictures of her car (two other pictures of her car were sent at the same time as that one, and I found no identical photos for them), and the second was a faceless picture of her showing what she was wearing. Both had matches shown on Pinterest, but on different accounts and different boards.
The only thing that I found suspicious was that some photos showed they were taken on an iPhone 16, whereas others did not show a phone model. Some of her mirror pictures however showed an iPhone X.
I am just not really sure what to think. I realize this is probably a very obvious, clear cut case that I don’t see out of bias, but I don’t understand why they would be catfishing me if they are not looking for anything to gain. At least it’s never been very obvious or telling. I’ve gone through different accounts in their followers / following, lots of them show places in the same area of Florida which matches their phone number’s area code. A few show NYC, which matches them having been in NYC for a little while, and only about 2-3 have shown California. It’s such a small batch out of ~300 accounts, but I feel like it still counts for something. Thank you for taking the time to read through this.
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u/ifiwerestill 1d ago
I think some people like playing pretend. Their lives aren't happy and it's a dopamine hit. I would move on of I were you.
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u/FourMarsupial 1d ago
You’re probably being catfished. Catfishing often isn’t about money. Look at it this way—if they don’t tell you their real name, their true identity, and they refuse to meet….they don’t want to be close to you. That’s all you need to know. You can dig and dig but it won’t change that they don’t want to be close to you. I hope you’ll have an epiphany that you’re wasting your time with someone you don’t actually know.