Today, my best friend and I were catfished on Hinge. It all started when Mame stumbled upon the profile of this gorgeous man who claimed to be Italian and Jamaican. They matched and they were having a great conversation but we both agreed that there was something about this man that seemed too good to be true. I even told Mame that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mame told me to try and match with him so we could play tag team detective. I scrolled for a while before I finally stumbled upon his profile and once we matched, it was on.

He was being a bit more dry in his responses to me than he was with her but among the two of us we amassed a nice amount of information. We learned about his upbringing, we learned he just bought a two bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he worked for a hedgefund, and he had a cat because he was too busy to get a dog. The more questions we asked him, the more perfect he appeared to be.

Mame and I finally decided to enlist the help of our friend Julie, who in my eyes is an expert at talking to men and getting them to tell you what you want to know. The moment we told Julie all the details about him, she was immediately skeptical. She began poking holes in everything he told us. We then had the idea to look him up on LinkedIn. The name displayed on our dream man’s profile was Alessandro. No last name. So in our LinkedIn search we simply put Alessandro along with the company that he claimed to work for. We couldn’t find him, but we found a profile with the same first name and background information and Ivy League education that our Alessandro boasted about. Julie raised the point that he could be catfishing information.

We immediately got to work trying to find some semblance of an online presence for our mystery man. We found nothing. Mame finally asked him for his Instagram and he immediately unmatched her. Then Julie mentioned that we should probably reverse search his image and we discovered that our mystery man indeed did not exist. The pictures we were looking at belonged to a French actor. Shook honestly wasn’t even the word to describe how we felt. We could do nothing but laugh. To fully confirm that this person did not exist, I sent one final message. “Hey, I’d love to hang out tomorrow. Are you available?” He immediately unmatched.