The Power of Data Points in Catfishing
I read a BBC article* about Sasha-Jay Davies who was impersonated by someone who built relationships with others, including romantic ones. Known as catfishing, it starts with stealing someone’s photos online and building whatever persona the catfish decides they will run with. The more data you leave online, the more realistic this persona can be.
A Cry for Connection
Catfishing is a sad affair, and it hurts more people than you'd think.
The person whose photos were taken feels violated in a way they can't repair. The fake profiles might get deleted, but that doesn't change the fact they existed, and that their face was used without their knowledge or consent. It's a privacy violation that isn't well defended.
The people who talked to the fake profile have their feelings hurt, sometimes badly. They lose a friend or a lover, and the fact that person wasn't real doesn't undo the connection they felt, which disappears the moment the truth lands. They get no closure, because for them the fake person was real.
And the catfish, whatever their motives, spends an enormous amount of time and energy keeping up with the lies: maintaining and remembering invented stories, profiles and relationships, when they could be doing almost anything else. It's often a cry for connection and a very human need to be social and part of a tribe. Sometimes it escalates and ends badly for everyone involved.
That's why this is worth talking about. Anyone can get catfished; anyone can be a catfish; and it's never just one person who suffers, because the catfish builds a web of lies that catches everyone who connects with the person they've invented.
Fishing for Data
If you have seen the documentary film Catfish or the follow-up TV series Catfish: The TV Show on MTV, you'll know the reasons why people catfish are wild. I've heard people on the show say it was just for fun or that it didn't matter because it was like The Sims (a life-simulating computer game).
I call it a "show", but there's nothing entertaining about the phenomenon itself. The people whose photos are used are violated. So are the people who believe the catfish and get pulled in. And the catfish is usually trying to patch over some pain of their own.
Who is the Real You?
If your social media profile is public and active, with a good amount of personal updates and photos, catfishing starts easily. Sometimes people recognise a copy-cat profile and report it, and that's the end of it.
It's a different story if the catfish changes your name and gets more imaginative — becoming you, but not entirely. You may not find out until a stranger tells you about a completely different character who happens to share your face.
Who is the real you then? You almost have to prove the catfish is fake and that you're real.
If you use the same nicknames or usernames across platforms, the catfish can find them and use them as data points to build a story. They come with varying levels of dedication, and some will search far and wide if it means more damage or a better profile.
This isn't paranoia. Sasha-Jay describes multiple profiles impersonating her, amassing thousands of followers and even roping in her family, spilling the online world into the real one.
Can Strong Security Settings Help?
Hayley Laskey of the UK Safer Internet Centre is quoted in the article recommending prevention and education: “limiting personal information online, using strong passwords and two-factor authentication, and being cautious before sending money or personal images.”
That advice is accurate, but it only goes so far.
Tightening your settings reduces the surface a stranger can harvest from:
fewer public photos
fewer usernames to cross-reference
fewer details to build a plausible person out of.
If there is no photo to steal, the catfish has data point to start building from.
What it can't do is help when the catfish is already inside your friends list, which they often are: a friend, a family member, your ex, your ex's friend. There is no single profile of a catfish.
So the honest answer is that settings shrink the raw material without removing the risk.
What actually matters is how much you share, and with whom.
That’s the uncomfortable part: as with most online harms, the law doesn't reliably punish the wrongdoer, so the burden falls on the person being harmed to change their behaviour instead.
Power Shift
It has always surprised me how little recourse you have in law if you're catfished.
The BBC article notes that catfishing is not always illegal in the UK, but you may have a case under the Fraud Act 2006. In Sasha-Jay's case, her legal representatives have issued a claim for harassment, misuse of private information and breach of data protection.
Those three grounds are probably available in most catfishing cases. The problem is practical rather than legal: the burden of proof can be high, there are multiple claims to establish, and most people don't have the money or the stamina to bring proceedings at all.
This means the power sits with the catfish, with little you can do to shift it. You can keep reporting fake accounts, and keep wondering where the next one will appear, and who the fake you might be talking to.
Catfishing doesn't have a clean ending. I don't have a fix or advice. Prevention helps at the margins, the law helps if you can afford it, and neither addresses what actually happened: someone borrowed a life. The Catfish hosts do some work to understand why catfish do what they do, and that's why I've been so interested in watching it. I recommend you give it a try.
When it's all over, there's nothing to point at: no injury, no missing object, despite the fact that the catfish did "steal". All we have are “feelings” which we know the law doesn’t particularly care about.
We are left with a set of relationships that turn out to have been held up by nothing, several people standing in the wreckage of something that was never there, and broken trust that can never be repaired.
* BBC, My identity was stolen and someone is using it to catfish men - it's terrifying, available at <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89kdn3e185o> accessed 31.07.2026