I got catfished before there was really a term for it and it caused a whole fucking ruckus in the apartment I shared. In 1997, I had moved to Chicago from the boonies of Connecticut. While I lived in CT, I was really socially isolated and mostly worked and went to lap dance places in Providence for funsies a couple times a month. I had hoped that moving to Chicago would open up my social life and I would meet some people my age but I had been so cut off socially that I didn't know how to talk to women at all. By the end of the year I was fat, lonely and horny so I called one of the ads in the back of the Chicago Reader. It was the night before me and my roommates all left town to go home for Christmas.
The booker asked me a bunch of intrusive questions that I never should have answered. I guess they had caller ID so they had the name of whoever was on the phone bill (not me ) and then they socially engineered my address and my roommates names out of me. I set up my date, left my house and hailed a cab to the sketchy no tell they said the girl was at. When I get to the room, I knock and no one is there. I find a payphone to call the number back and no one picks up. It couldn't have been more than 30 minutes since I hung up at my house and got to the room. I'm wondering what the fuck all of that was about? I grabbed some food and got a cab home. Back at the apartment, shit had gotten wild.
Apparently, the hustle was to get personal info out of me so that they could blackmail me. Of course, they were shitty criminals so, while I was trying to meet up they had gone to my house and threatened my roommates, saying that I had wasted their girl's time and that I now owed them some incredible sum that they would be back for. Of course everyone was shitting bricks and I had to have a very serious conversation and basically grovel to not get 86d from that apartment. As far as I know, the scammers never came back. I think the only reason I got to stay in that apartment is that everybody had time to cool off during the holiday break. For years I wondered how the fuck that all went so wrong. It wasn't until many years later that I realized that the intention had been to finesse me from the beginning.