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What is catfishing and what risks it poses?
They create fake accounts to enter into intimate relationships online. However, sometimes the innocent fun ends tragically. The common phenomenon of catfishing can be deadly.
Twenty-four-year-old Crystal Theobald was shot to death in 2006 by gang members in Riverside, California. Her mother was a witness to the murder. Frustrated with the ineptitude of the police, she decided to act on her own. Knowing that her daughter was active on social media, she and her niece created two fake profiles of young attractive girls that the Riverside gangsters could “like”. They downloaded profile pictures from the Internet and made up descriptions. The criminals got caught. They began corresponding with beautiful teenage girls from MySpace.com, actually relatives of the murdered girl. In time, the women tracked down the one who pulled the trigger. The man was arrested and confessed to the crime. The story told years later in the Netflix documentary “Why Did You Kill Me?” shows another side of a much darker phenomenon: catfishing.
