If you come across a beautiful college-aged brunette on a dating app who seems too good to be true, it’s because it is. And she is.
Even though Isabela Becker, a Dallas native and Texas Tech student, appears to be on dating apps, she actually has a boyfriend and has no interest in dating you. Someone, however, has been using her photos, her social media pages and part of her life story to catfish men into believing she does, though.
In August, a man reached out to Becker to let her know that someone on Bumble was using her photos. Becker asked the man to report the account and thought that was the end of it.
A few months later, another man sent Becker a direct message on Instagram and asked why she was posting photos with another man. Confused, Becker asked what he was talking about.
“He was like, ‘Don’t play dumb,’” she says. “‘You know you just got caught.’”
She explained that someone might be using her photos to catfish him. Unwilling to believe it, the man texted who he thought was Becker, aka the catfish. The catfish told him that it was Becker who was the fake one. It wasn’t until Becker and the man got on FaceTime that he believed the real Becker.
Becker says roughly 12 men have reached out to her thinking they had been talking to her. One guy made a TikTok detailing the whole thing with Nev Schulman, the creator of Catfish: The TV Show, commenting on it, “How many times do I have to tell you guys!!!!”“All of the guys I’ve talked to told me that they saw my face and thought, ‘This is almost too good to be true.’” – Isabela Becker
“That’s when it started to make me mad,” Becker says. “Because now I have these guys just coming into my life. It’s just so weird.”
The woman pretending to be Becker has confessed to Becker, but she continues to use her photos online as her own.
“I had a guy reach out to me just a few days ago and I was like, ‘I thought this was over,’” Becker says.
If you’ve seen Catfish the movie or the TV show, then you know that typically a catfish will use someone else’s photos to lure in a potential mate, but that’s it. Usually, they create entirely new social media pages and make up their own backstory. But this catfish is fully pretending to be Becker, Becker says. To explain the boyfriend in Becker’s photos, the catfish told the men that the boyfriend was abusive and mean and she couldn’t leave him.
“All of the guys I’ve talked to told me that they saw my face and thought, ‘This is almost too good to be true,’” Becker says. “But then once they started texting the girl, once the girl started calling them and stuff like that, they started to believe it.”
One guy got so far into the relationship that he flew to Lubbock to meet the woman he thought was Becker. Twice. The catfish stood him up both times.
“That is absolutely terrifying because Lubbock is a small town,” Becker says. “It was really creepy because he came on a weekend and of course, I’m out and about and I could have run into this guy anywhere. That’s what’s terrifying.”
Becker has deleted a lot of her photos and blocked the catfish, but the catfish persists.
“She knows everything about me,” Becker says.
