When I was 14, one of my friends, who was about the same age, had met someone called Dan online from England. After interacting with him for a month, she introduced me to him on the social media website where we all then began to talk quite often. We grew pretty close and Dan’s friend Tibb, along with a few other people from different parts of the world, joined our group of internet friends.

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Dan and Tibb didn’t really talk about their personal lives much unless it came up in conversation, and only after we shared something about ourselves. The two were a part of a neighbourhood ‘gang’. The purpose of this gang was just a group of ‘lads’ roaming the streets getting in fights and stuff. Whenever they                    talked about their life, though, they were weirdly reluctant to give                   away names or specific details. After a while, I began talking to                           Tibb individually a lot more often. He opened up about a                                traumatic incident from his past about his brother and shared that                   he had a lot of issues with sleep which sounded really similar to                       something I was going through myself and made me feel safe to talk               about personal problems with him.

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            At this point, I wanted to see his accounts on other social media to               communicate more but he was strangely hesitant to give me that                    information. It wasn’t too difficult though for me to find and stalk his Facebook page and do some image investigation. Over time, Dan and Tibb            would often talk about incidents from their daily lives or dramatic stories           from their gang fights. However, those situations wouldn’t add up with the         posts I was secretly monitoring on their other social media. I started to question if they were lying about their identities, or at least falsifying some parts of their lives. It was really weird that nobody else was openly suspicious about the two and I wondered if they were orchestrating these conversations by controlling all the other accounts apart from their own but that seemed too far fetched. Anyway, I didn’t bring up this issue because I found a sense of comfort and attachment in this friendship that I didn’t have otherwise in real life and was afraid of losing it.

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It had been a year into this friendship and during one conversation, Tibb revealed that one side of his family was in the Italian mafia which, as crazy as it sounds, wasn’t even the weirdest part of his anecdotes. He was quite adamant on deactivating his account and joining this family mafia after graduating high school because of his skills in navigating gang politics and I finally expressed how ridiculous it all sounded.

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My scepticism escalated and the online interactions were deteriorating. Most users became quite inactive except for Tibb who continued occasionally coming online, despite his plans to leave. One day he talked to me personally about something terrible that he went through, which was him having to ‘kill’ his father under persuasion of his uncles, amidst some mafia drama. He said that he wished he could pursue football and live a normal life like Dan was. I was sure that none of this was real but I played along anyway, sympathising with his loss.

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Recently, years after we stopped talking, I found Tibb’s account on Instagram. While going through them, I saw a new picture of him… at a football match, with his father who was supposed to be dead. We aren’t in touch anymore but I’m still unsure of whether Dan and Tibb’s images and information were being used by a catfish posing as them, who possibly knew them in real life or if it was truly them, just exaggerating their life stories for the heck of it to reel me into a false friendship.

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