Catfish: The TV Show (2012–…): Season 8, Episode 26 - Scooba & Renae - full transcript
Scooba falls for Renae on a virtual social app, but soon after marrying her avatar she vanishes. Renae returns six years later to rekindle the romance.
- Six years ago,
Scooba meets Renae on a virtual social network.
- She was the love of my life,
but then one day she was gone.
- She thought about you, she found you again, like,
she wants to be in your life.
- [gasps] Shut the [bleep] up.
- Wow, that almost makes the case that Renae is legit.
- I'm very much at the edge of my seat right now.
[dings]
[dramatic music]
[upbeat music]
♪
- Let's text Kamie.
"Wassup?"
- Oh, hey. - What's up?
- What are those balloons back there?
- My birthday balloons.
- It's your birthday?
Oh, my God, I had no idea.
- Stop.
- If I would've known,
I would've had something sent to you
that's behind you that you have to go get.
- Really? - Yes.
- There's nothing in here.
- Look outside.
- [grunts]
- Let me get dressed.
- I found something.
[horn blows]
Hey!
- Happy birthday!
- Ay!
- But wait, there's more.
- Wow, look at this.
all: ♪ Happy birthday to you
♪ Happy birthday to you
[cheering]
- Thank you! [horns blowing]
all: Happy birthday, Nev! - I love you guys.
[horns blowing] - Wow.
That was fun. Thank you.
- Party's over.
- Thanks for helping make my birthday great.
Now that we've celebrated,
I think we should get to work.
Here we go. We got an email from Stephen.
"Dear Nev and Kamie,
"my name is Stephen, or as my friends call me,
"Scooba.
"I'm 23 years old,
"and I live about an hour outside of Chicago.
"I'm a groundskeeper at a golf course
"and also take care of my mom.
"Six years ago, I met a girl named Renae
"on IMVU.
We suddenly clicked and began dating."
- ♪ And I just want you to know ♪
- IMVU is like a game, right?
- It's more like a virtual world.
- ♪ And then I look up at the moon ♪
- "Renae lived in England,
"and we couldn't meet in person,
"but it didn't faze me.
"She understood me and my views on life
"in a way that no one else seemed to.
I fell in love with her."
- ♪ I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you ♪
♪ I love you
♪
- "Everything had been going well,
"but about eight months after we met,
Renae ghosted me."
- ♪ I'm alone, nothing happening on my phone ♪
- "I messaged her for weeks.
"I was heartbroken, but after five years,
suddenly, I got a message from her."
- ♪ And for a minute, I was feeling so stupid ♪
- "She said she wanted to get back in touch..."
- ♪ I reached into my heart
♪ Pulled out an arrow from Cupid ♪
- "But we haven't talked or video chatted.
"That being said,
"I still feel a connection to her.
"I'd love your help getting to the bottom of this.
Thank you, Scooba."
Wow. Let me text him.
For Renae to not talk to him for five years
and then reconnect
and still be lying again now?
It almost makes the case that Renae is legit.
- Kind of, but it's super weird.
[dings] - Oh.
Whoa! - Hello!
- Hello, Scooba Steve.
[laughter]
- How did you get the nickname Scooba?
- A few years ago, I used to work at a tire shop,
and they had three Steves working there,
and an employee just shouted, "Call him Scooba."
[laughter]
- So let's talk about this a little bit.
Very curious about this Renae.
Take us back to, like, how you guys met.
- I was on IMVU.
I was just combing through different group chats.
Then I just joined in,
and Renae and I kinda clicked.
We were the same age at the time, 17.
And then we continued it from there.
- But you didn't know what she looked like, right?
Because you only saw her little digital avatar.
- Yeah.
- Did you guys only ever talk through IMVU?
- No, eventually we moved over to Kik.
- You could send photos on Kik, right?
- Right.
- So you have seen photos of her?
- Yes. I thought she was beautiful.
- And when you guys were talking,
were you guys getting into, like, real deep stuff or...
- At the time, yes.
I mean, "What do you wanna do with your life?
Where do you see yourself in ten years?"
Basic teenager stuff.
At that time,
it was also very stressful.
Let's just say...
I haven't had the best father figures in my life,
and that was something that we very much connected with.
- And you also mentioned that you take care of your mom.
Were you dealing with that back then?
- Yes.
She is disabled, and I am her medical aide.
So the escapism talking to Renae
was kind of nice.
In my mind, I was away from home with that.
We were very much in a relationship.
- Do you ever talk on the phone?
- Well, no.
- So you've never heard her voice?
- Nope.
Like, I tried to get her on Skype,
and it was very much excuses,
but I kinda just shrugged it off
because it was still a consistent communication.
- Hmm.
- But for a while, she was your girlfriend?
So how did it end?
- I ended up talking with her brother.
The conversation was just fairly simple brotherly,
"Don't hurt my sister" stuff.
But then one day,
there was supposedly an argument happening,
and her dad got on
and started mocking me,
mocking the idea of the relationship.
It was very unsettling to me.
- How does a dad know how to use Kik?
[dramatic music]
- After that night happened, she was gone.
- She stops responding to your messages?
Wow.
And in IMVU?
- Never online again.
- So that was it?
You just stopped hearing from her.
- Just gone.
- What was that like to feel like you had this girlfriend
that you were in love with-- - Oh, it sucked.
100% sucked. It hurt a lot.
I tried for a few months
to try and see if I could get something.
Facebook, Instagram, another account,
but I couldn't find her.
- She just totally vanished?
- And then I lived my life and moved on.
- And then six years go by,
and you just get a random message?
- Yeah.
Just, "Hi, this is me. It's been a while."
Blah blah blah blah blah.
I mean, I was excited. I mean, it was cool.
I had no talked to this person in years.
- Had you thought about her? - Yeah.
I mean, she was the love of my life.
- Wow.
So give us the update on Renae.
So okay, so now she's 23. What's her deal?
- All I know is that on her Facebook,
it says she in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom,
and that is it.
It's a barebones Facebook. I'm her only friend.
That extremely brings up a red flag.
- Weird. What's her Facebook name?
Is just Renae, or does she have a last name?
- She says that it's Renae Savage.
- Oh, no.
No, Scooba.
No, that's not a good sign, honey.
- I'd like to see the profile. - We can do that.
- All right, so here she is. Okay.
[investigative music]
From Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
You're her only friend.
Has one picture.
Tattoo on her finger, nose ring.
Is this girl you remember?
- 100%, but she was a brunette. - Oh, okay.
- I mean, she's cute, obviously.
Do you have messages that we can see?
- I do.
♪
- "Well, first off, I want to say
"I'm deeply sorry, like, genuinely.
"I wanted to get in contact with you after all these years
"because I never forgot.
"I felt bad for basically everything,
"and in the moment,
I never realized how much my decisions would affect me."
- "I tried to find you back on Kik,
"after the whole ordeal.
"I messaged you once,
but your account was no longer active."
So she's saying that she was trying to find you.
- Yeah. - Allegedly.
- Yeah, allegedly.
- Do you still have your Kik account?
- Nope.
- "Renae, you were the love of my life.
"I'm honestly so speechless right now.
I can't believe we're talking to each other."
- "So you truly missed me," she said.
"I mean, we were young.
We were, like, what? 17?"
"Yeah, and?
We were married for two months."
Did you guys get married on IMVU?
- Yeah, it's a thing that you can pay for.
- Oh, my God. - Wow.
I mean, I have to say, like,
considering that you haven't talked in six years,
and you kinda just picked up where you left off,
you've gotta be excited.
- I mean, I am, but I'm also guarded.
- Right.
So all we have for this girl is this Facebook profile.
- Mm-hmm.
- Do you still have your IMVU account?
- No.
- So you no longer have access to Renae's profile then?
- No.
- We need some more information.
So I feel like we need you
to kind of try and get a little bit more info
for us if we're gonna do some research for you.
Wait, is she online? She's active right now.
- Yeah. - [gasps]
- Do you wanna see if she can chat right now?
- I mean, I could try.
- "All I really know about you
"is that you live somewhere in the UK.
"What else can you tell me about yourself?
What's your number? I'd love to hear your voice."
We've never looked up an English phone number.
- No, we haven't. Can we?
- I don't even know. Yeah, I'd be curious.
- That's if we get it.
- Come on.
- Well, she read it. - Oh, wait, she saw it.
- Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.
She's typing.
- Okay.
[all groaning]
- Come on. That is just an excuse.
- All right, so let's let her work,
and in the meantime,
we've got this photo, we've got her name.
We can do a little poking around,
see if we find something. - Right.
- We'll talk to you soon, dude.
- All right. - See you soon, Scooba.
- Later.
- I feel like Scooba's definitely getting catfished.
There's, like, no doubt about it.
- I mean, all he really knows about her
is she lives in England, and she's cute,
so it's time for Scooba
to ask some tough questions
and demand some real answers.
- ♪ You can never say never
♪ When we've been waiting forever ♪
- Put your hat on. - [sighs] Really?
- There's more surprise.
[dings] - Happy birthday, Daddy.
You gotta make a wish. You gotta make a wish.
- Okay, ready? I'm gonna blow.
You guys help me blow them?
- Blow close.
- Yay!
- Happy birthday, Daddy! We love you.
- Whoo!
- The kids are like, "Give me the doughnuts."
- [laughs] Yeah, Beau, get it.
Cleo, eat that after dinner, okay?
After dinner. - Yum!
- [gasps] - [laughs]
- Oh!
All right, the rest you can have after dinner.
All right, love you guys.
I gotta go finish working, okay?
- I love you, baby. - All right, love you guys.
- See you!
- We love you!
[upbeat music]
- All right.
Let's get down to business.
We got Scooba.
Six years ago, he was 17,
and he meets this girl named Renae.
They hit off, they talk for months,
they get really close,
and then all of a sudden, she disappears.
Fast forward to six years later,
he gets random message from a new Facebook profile
with her picture and name.
"Hey, it's me, Renae.
Do you remember from six years ago?"
- So who is this girl,
and why did she pop back up after all this time?
- This is gonna be interesting.
So what do we got?
So Renae's info.
- "Hey, I haven't heard back from Renae yet,
"but I figured I should just send you the link
"to her Facebook so you have it.
"These are the things I know about her:
"She's 23, she lives in Wolverhampton, UK,
"She's either a nurse or a nursing student,
"and her brother's name is Dylan.
"I'll let you know as soon as I hear back.
Scooba."
All right, well, let's go to her Facebook.
Let me share. Hold on.
All right, here we go.
So here she is. Okay.
There's not a lot to go off of.
From Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
One photo.
This is clearly a profile she made just for him,
but there's not nothing.
I mean, we got this photo,
so I just wanna see if this picture comes up.
What? Oh, my God.
There is one. - Shut the [bleep] up.
- There's a ton of pictures of this girl.
Acacia [bleep].
Well, that was easy.
- Oh, my God.
- Is that an Instagram?
Two million followers!
She's got two kids. She lives in Oregon.
Oh, there, look at this one. Look.
Tattoo on her finger, nose ring,
it's definitely her. - 1,000%.
- All right, I'm gonna message her.
Maybe she knows who's been stealing her pictures.
- I'm sure she has people
stealing her photos all the time.
- "Hey, Acacia,
"would love if you
can help us out."
[dings] - Ding.
- Okay, so now we know
that the girl in the pictures is Acacia.
- Mm-hmm.
- Which means now we have confirmation
that Renae is a liar.
- Pants on fire. - Ah!
- What? - Whoa, look at this.
Her Facebook URL
I mean...
- So it's [bleep] Tyana Smith.
- What? - [laughs]
- How did Scooba not notice this?
- I mean, this is, like,
such a specific place in the UK to be "from."
We need to search for Tyana Smith
in that town. - All right, yeah.
Let's look up Tyana Smith,
and let's go to city.
And what the name...
- Wolverine.
- [laughs]
Wolverhampton.
Oh, there it is!
- Oh, Bushbury. That's the one.
Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
[both gasping] - Oh, we got a hit.
There is a Tyana Smith in Wolverhampton, UK.
This is her!
- That woman is not twentysomething years old.
She's definitely older.
- If this is her, why would she be so careless?
Is it possible he's been talking to this lady
the whole time?
- There has to be a reason
why she disappeared the first time around.
Maybe they realized that he was too young,
and they were, like, "Eh," but now that he's older...
- Oh.
- They're trying to creep back in.
- Interesting.
Obviously, if they lied about their picture,
then it totally makes sense
that it could be an older woman.
- Poor Scooba. Something's up.
[dramatic music]
- So now we know that Renae
has been lying at least about the photos.
I think we should tell Scooba
that we've searched the photo,
and it immediately brought us back this girl.
- And even crazier,
I think we should also be like,
"Hey, did you see Tyana Smith?"
It's right there on Renae's URL,
and it led us right to an older woman
in Wolverhampton, UK.
That's going to flip Scooba out.
- All right, let me text Scooba.
"Hey, buddy, let's get back to work."
I mean, I think him knowing that she's lying
at least about the photos
will give him a little bit of motivation
to press her now.
[dings]
- Hello. both: Hey.
- We're back.
- Welcome back. - How are you doing?
- I'm kind of going with the flow.
- Well, we've got some things to talk about.
- Okay.
- We took the photo from her Facebook page,
and we did an image search, and it came back right away.
The image search brought a bunch of photos up...
- Oh, wow.
- Of some other girl,
and we found her Instagram.
Her name is Acacia. She's verified.
She's got millions of followers.
She's got two kids, but here she is.
This is the girl. - Huh.
Weird.
- So we now know
Renae is at the very least lying about...
- Who she is. Yeah.
- I messaged Acacia on Instagram.
- Okay. - Because I--
We were hoping that maybe we could talk to her,
and see if she knows anything about Renae,
but I haven't heard anything back.
The other thing that jumped out at us
when we went to Renae's Facebook page
is the URL. - Mm.
Did you notice that? - I didn't,
'cause I've only really looked at it in the app,
and the app doesn't necessarily give you a URL.
- I mean, that's pretty weird.
- Mm-hmm.
That's intriguing.
- Do you know a Tyana Smith?
- No.
- So we searched for Tyana Smith
from Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
It brought us to this profile.
♪
- Wow.
- This woman is clearly not 23.
We don't know for sure if it's her,
but what if they are older than they said that they were?
- If they're much older than me now,
they were much older than me then,
and then that just turns into,
"Why were you that age pretending to be that age
when I was honest about my age?"
- Right, right.
Very creepy, very weird.
[dings] - Oh.
I got a response from Acacia.
- Oh? - Oh?
- "Hi, oh, my goodness, of course.
Let me know what I can do. I'm free now."
Should we invite her to join our Zoom?
- Yeah, we might as well.
- "For sure. Hopping on now."
All right, get ready. Scooba, you're about to meet
the girl whose photos you fell in love with.
- Mm.
- I'm nervous now. [dings]
- Oh! - Oh!
- Hey. - Hello.
- Hi.
- What's up? - Hello.
- Hi.
- It's Acacia, right?
- Yeah, hi.
- So hello, I'm Nev, and this is Kamie.
- I'm Scooba. - Hi.
- Welcome to "Catfish."
- Cool. - Aw.
Did you ever think you would end up on it?
- Um, to be honest,
yeah, I've kind of been waiting for this moment.
- Is that because people use your pictures
to make fake profiles a lot? - Yeah.
Like, for, like, ten years of my life.
- Wow.
- We're working on an episode right now,
and we're helping Scooba out.
He's been talking to a girl named Renae.
So they talked for, like, eight months in 2014,
it got really serious... - Okay.
- We started talking on
the virtual dating app, IMVU.
We started dating, and then we moved over to Kik.
- Gotcha.
- And then she disappeared.
- And then six years go by,
and she pops up out of nowhere
using a blonde photo of you.
♪
- Still claims her name is Renae.
There's only one photo,
and we ran that photo,
and it right away brought us to you.
- Okay.
- So we know this girl's obviously not you.
- Yeah.
- Unless you've been pretending to be a girl named Renae
and talking to Scooba for the last six years.
- [stammering] I have not. - [laughs]
- Have you had any interaction with
or known of any of these people,
and have you dealt with any of them?
- Um, no, so I, like,
I would get messages every now and then
even today saying, like--
which is funny that you mention it, Kik.
People would be like, "We talked on Kik, like...
And I'm like,
and now it's making me nervous 'cause you say 2014 and Kik,
and I'm like, "Oh, goodness.
Like, is it the same person that's been doing this?"
- [sighs]
- But my picture's on Tumblr.
That's where most of them began.
Um, they kind of just blew up,
and they just were spread all over Facebook pages and stuff.
So, like, I became this, like, stock photo image
that nobody really knew who I was.
They just recognized my face. - Saw your face.
- Yeah. - Right.
- And so those pictures just went everywhere,
and then they became so many things
that just weren't me.
- Do you remember anyone ever saying
they were talking to you,
and they thought your name was Renae?
- No, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I remember at one point
my dad and I sat down,
and we, like, counted the Facebook pages one day
that used my picture, and it was, like, up in the 500s.
[tense music]
So... [laughs]
- Wow.
- What?
- That's insane.
- Like, they just found your face,
which is obviously a perfect face--
like, you look like an elven princess...
- Very symmetrical.
- From "Lord of the Rings" or something.
- [laughs] - Very symmetrical, yeah.
- So it makes sense.
- "Very symmetrical." [laughs]
- So you don't know Renae,
but does the name Tyana Smith,
does that ring a bell?
- No, I don't know any of those people.
- [sighs]
- All right. Very nice to meet you.
- Yes, very nice to meet you.
- I'm so sorry this happened to you.
- Thank you.
- Thanks for helping us out.
- Bye. Thank you.
- Bye.
[somber music]
- [sighs] Wow.
- Yeah.
- How are you feeling about all this so far?
- ♪ Hold my breath in
- It is a bummer. It is a bummer.
- ♪ While she rips my heart out ♪
- I'm--I'm in a mixture
of frustrated,
relieved that I got some truth,
and um, accepting that truth.
- ♪ Watch me as
♪ My world burns down
- Why disrupt somebody's life
after six years to just continue a lie?
- ♪ Though my heart is telling me to go ♪
- I'm sorry, Scooba.
- That was--it was a lot.
- ♪ That you sunk my ship
♪ And then you let me drown
- I'm sorry, Scooba.
This was, like, a lot.
- Why disrupt somebody's life
after six years to just continue a lie
when you could just come out straight who you are?
[somber music]
I'm now at the point
where I just kinda wanna know.
'Cause she's already lied to me about her face,
what else could she be lying to me about, you know?
- Right.
- What if it's not Tyana Smith?
What if it is a girl you age,
but she looks nothing like Acacia?
How much would that even matter to you?
Like, at the beginning of all this,
for a good six months,
you guys were just avatars,
and you didn't know what each other looked like.
- We would have to start over.
A new level of trust would have to be built.
- Clearly, she's drawn to you.
She's thought about you, she found you again.
Like, she wants to be in your life.
So in a way, you do have some leverage.
- Or is she playing a mind game?
- Well, yeah, but even if she's just playing a mind game,
the fact that she came back to you after six years
suggests that you have significance to her.
- She has something to say to you.
She has something to say to you.
[dings]
- Well, she just messaged me that she's on break.
- All right, share that "scween."
Let's try to get as much information
as we can out of her.
Things that we could search, locations, screennames.
We need more clues.
It feels like it's gonna take some pushing,
and you're gonna have to, you know, really--
I don't wanna say demand, but...
- Push it. - Yeah.
Pressure her to give you some answers.
- You can't scare her away. You've gotta lube it up first.
This situation needs lube.
- All right, guys.
- How about, do you still live in the UK?
- Her Facebook page says she does.
- She's a [bleep] liar. We know this to be true.
[dings] - Oh, oh!
- Oh, she said, "Yeah, why you ask?"
- "Just curious."
- [laughs]
- We have to butter her up. What do you want me to say?
- I'm ready to [bleep] go in hard.
I don't know why we're playing games with this girl.
When she popped back up,
she had her chance to come clean, and she [bleep] blew it.
- Right, I mean, I'm ready to go balls to the wall.
- Not out the gate!
- We're going in too hard,
but we're definitely, like, making it clear
that we're not [bleep] around anymore.
Next question.
Is Renae your real name?
'Cause your Facebook profile URL is Tyana Smith.
[dings] - Right.
[gasps] Ooh, ooh, ooh. - Oh.
- "Yes, silly. My Facebook email
is the same one I used for my IMVU if you remember that."
- I don't remember that.
- Be like, "Oh, I don't remember.
What was that again?"
- Oh, oh. - Ah, ah!
- What?
- That's an old IMVU photo.
- Whoa.
- No, she's trying to [bleep] derail us.
That's not what we asked.
- You're right, she is trying to change the topic.
So say, "Oh, my God. Crazy.
What was your username?"
- Oh, she's responding.
[dramatic music]
"Hold on. Let me look."
So she's still on there.
- I personally wouldn't know.
I'm glad I haven't gone back.
- "So I have to get back to work now,
but I'll send you that username when I find it."
- Oh, God.
- Okay, we need the [bleep] username
so that we can look her up
and see if there's any more information about her
in her bio,
and unfortunately, we're kind of, like,
at her beck and call right now. - Yeah.
And she's supposedly "at work,"
so she's not gonna reply.
- If we believe that she's in the UK,
it's late now. It's evening.
Whatever she wants us to believe,
we'll pretend that that's what's happening.
- Yeah.
- So I would say, leave it alone.
- We wait for her to give the username.
We need the username. It's all we need.
- Right, let's see if she gets that to us.
So we'll see if she gets back to you,
we'll meet back up tomorrow,
and I do think you'll have to make it very clear
that if you're gonna move forward,
in a friendship, or a relationship, or whatever...
- You need to be honest. - Exactly.
- We'll figure out where this leads.
- So yeah, I guess we'll talk to you in the morning.
- See you tomorrow.
I tell you,
Scooba has major firewalls.
He's not allowing for any type of encryption [bleep].
- Although, he does have one vulnerability: Renae.
- Mm-hmm. [cell phone dings]
- Oh, he said she just messaged her username.
- Ooh!
- Do you wanna quickly look up that username?
- Yes. - IMVU.
- Because you can't just Google her username.
You have to be on IMVU in order to search her.
- Right, right.
"Glow up your avatar in 3D."
Whoa.
- We have to create a character.
We have to make one.
- All right. Should we be male or female?
- Make me, make me.
- All right, female. - Female.
- Hair, what are you looking for?
- Oh, this is so fun.
I'm definitely doing this later.
Ooh, do the wavy hair. Cute.
- I don't know. Okay, that's fine.
All right.
- You're just gonna make her a basic bitch?
- Yes. - What?
- We're on a mission here, Kamie.
Are we in?
- Could've at least given her a blouse.
Maybe a skirt.
Some nail polish?
- All right, so here is Renae's profile name.
- Look at all the basic bitches that look exactly like us.
- All right, let's see.
[gasps] There it is.
- [gasps] What? Antarctica?
- That's gotta be a joke. Wow.
- That's her. - Ooh, there's a phone number!
- [gasps]
That's definitely not a UK number.
- That's true.
Let's search this number. - Run the number.
[exciting music]
Ooh.
♪
- No name associated with this number.
Look at this.
It's a Virginia cell phone number.
- Not a text app? - It's a Verizon phone number.
She's not in the UK,
'cause the phone number is a U.S. number from Virginia.
Does that mean Tyana Smith from Wolverhampton is not her?
- It still means she's a liar!
She has a real number that she could've given to him
if she really wanted to talk to him,
but she doesn't. Something is wrong.
- She's not in the UK,
she's not the Tyana lady we found,
so who is she?
[dings]
- Oh, there she is.
[warm music]
She ready?
- She ready.
- All right, so here's what we got.
Obviously, we know the girl in the picture is Acacia,
this other girl,
but there's very little information
that we actually have about Renae,
except we found her IMVU profile,
and she does put phone number on there,
which is an American cell phone.
So not only is Renae lying about who she is,
she's also lying about where she is.
Let me text our guy here and get him back.
- Scooba.
Abracadabra.
Scooba-doo! [dings]
- Hi, guys. - Hi.
- Hey.
We do have some things to discuss.
Before we do that, have you talked to...
- No, no, I have not. - No.
Okay, looking back
on what we discovered yesterday,
how has that filtered down
and kind of changed your feelings
about this whole situation?
- Well, I'm kind of riding the waves
and see where this goes.
- Do you have any other friends of family
that know about Renae?
- No, other than my mom.
- Well, what does she think?
- Would you like to talk to her?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, I would love to meet your mom.
- All right, let me go get her.
- What's her name? - Charity.
- [gasps] ♪ Oh, my goodness
- It's very nice to meet you, Mom.
- Very nice to meet you both too.
- Good to meet you.
So what do you know about this Renae,
and what do you think about it?
- Well, he's the type of kid that gets attached easily
if he finds connection.
I do want to him to be with someone that he connects with,
I do, 'cause he doesn't have the exact easy life.
I do have
mental illness issues.
- Yeah.
- So it's hard, and I just feel the need
to make sure that my son doesn't fall on his face
because he does wear his heart on his sleeve.
- Well, we're gonna help him figure out
who this Renae girl is.
We have a little bit of new information for him
we wanna go over so that he can forge ahead.
Great meeting you though. Thank you.
- Lovely meeting you guys too.
- Thanks, Mom. Bye.
- Bye. - And she's so sweet.
- All right, well, interestingly,
yesterday when you asked Renae about her IMVU,
she provided her profile,
and when we searched the screenname,
it comes up with her profile.
So there's still a little bit of information on here.
It's not much, but it does have a phone number.
- Really?
- Obviously, this wasn't here when you talked to her
six years ago.
- So we looked up this phone number.
It came back unknown,
but it turns out it's a Virginia cell phone number.
- Oh, wow.
- And you did ask her as well, like,
"Are you still in the UK?" And she said, "Yes,"
but this says she's in Virginia.
- That's very interesting.
- The good news is, now there's potentially a way to reach her
other than Facebook if we need it.
- Right.
- Major, major parts of what you thought you knew
about this girl seem to not be true.
- Yeah, at all.
- And that feels to me like it's some, you know,
it gives some real ammunition
to kinda show our cards and say, "Hey, look,
"we know you're not the girl in the pictures.
"We spoke to her.
We know you have a U.S. phone number."
- Now we can let the hammer down.
- So you wanna start from your phone?
Because I like the idea
of you doing this first for you,
and she should do what's right by you
because you're the person she's been talking to.
- Agreed.
[dramatic music]
- All right, she is active right now.
- Oh, great. - Ooh.
- "Hello Renae, I video chatted with Acacia yesterday.
"I know you haven't been telling me the truth
"about who you are,
"and I wanna give you that chance to come clean.
It's now or never."
- Whoa. Wow, I love it.
No hesitation.
He just [bleep] jams that send button.
- Ah, she read it! - Oh!
- Oh, oh, she saw it, she saw it.
- Oh, my God.
- I'm very much at the edge of my seat right now.
- "Wow. Give me a second."
- I've given you six years.
- I think you should now say, "If you're ready to do this,
let's do it, you know, face to face."
And now send the Zoom link.
- Oh, she read it.
- Oh, oh!
- Ooh, she's typing, she's typing, she's typing.
- Oh, yeah.
♪
Oh, my goodness. - [gasps]
- All right.
Scooba, are you ready to, like,
hold her feet to the fire
and ask her some tough questions?
- Oh, yeah. - Collective deep breath.
[all inhale]
[all exhale]
That was nice.
- Oh, oh.
- Hi. - Hi.
- Hello. - Hi.
- Hello, hello.
♪
- Are you the person Scooba has been talking to?
- Yeah.
- You're clearly not the person
that is on your Facebook.
♪
- Okay, hold on a second.
I just wanna take a second
to kinda just let Renae introduce herself
because I don't even think we know your real name.
Can you just give us a quick overview of who you are,
what your name is, where you live,
just so we know who we're talking to?
- Oh, okay, my name is Kishana.
I'm from Roanoke, Virginia,
and I am Haitian American.
- Are you in classroom?
- Are you in school right now? - Yeah.
- Well, school session is out,
but I am in a study room.
- Why lie? [laughs]
- So I've asked myself that a lot of times,
but at the time...
I wasn't so comfortable in my skin,
and I wasn't really comfortable with myself,
so it was easier for me to put on a different persona
than to be myself.
- What aspects did you lie
and what aspect did you tell the truth about to me?
- Okay, so the lies were,
um, the part about, like,
my brother that you remember.
- Wait, did your brother actually text Stephen?
- No. - No?
- No.
- So that was you?
- Yeah, it was me.
♪
- Did I ever speak to your dad?
- No.
- No? Okay.
- Mm.
- Yeah.
- Why?
- Yeah, why?
- I felt like I couldn't keep up with it anymore,
so it was just so much easier
to just drop it and act like it never happened.
I'm sorry, that's just how I thought at the time.
- What about your URL
on Facebook for Renae is, like, a Tyana Smith?
Who is that?
- Honestly, when I was with my ex-boyfriend,
and I was suspecting he was doing something,
so I made to message him at the time.
- Okay.
- I can understand why as a teenager
you weren't ready to come clean,
but why not reach out
at this point now as yourself?
- When I initially texted you,
I was, like, I'm gonna be like,
"Okay, I'm just gonna tell him. I'm gonna let him know."
But, like, the more that I talked to you,
it was easier to be Renae with you
than it would've been easier for me to be, like,
Kishana with you,
'cause even though we're the same,
I just felt like you're connected with her
and not with me, if that makes sense.
- Are you talking about a physical connection?
- Yeah, that was, like,
that was kind of, like, a part of me, 'cause I was like,
"Oh, my gosh, like,
"what if, like, how I look doesn't amount to, like,
how she looks, and he's completely devastated?"
Basically, I made it 'cause at the time...
I was like,
"Oh, it would just be so much more easier, like...
Nobody gotta know, like..."
Like, I could've just been somebody else.
- I know Black girl to Black girl
on the internet,
it can be difficult to make friends as yourself,
especially in these virtual worlds.
You're on these apps and playing these games,
and you subconsciously make a white character
because you feel like it might be more presentable
or people will want to talk to you more,
but in the beginning, when you guys met on IMVU,
he didn't know what you looked like for six months.
You could've looked like anybody.
He could've been completely into you as you.
- Part of me just didn't want to, like,
let him know 'cause I was like,
"We've already come so far, like,
like, why just break that now?"
- Hmm.
- What were your feelings for him then
and what your feelings for him now?
- I did love you.
Indeed, I did.
Reconnecting with you now,
it made me miss how you treated me.
I would like to get to know you again.
I would love to, like, start something with Stephen,
and if you're willing and open to,
I do see that in our future.
Maybe there could be something there again.
♪
- I wanna just check in with Steve.
Hang tight.
We'll come back to you in a few minutes
after we chat quickly.
- All right, sounds great.
[dings] - [sighs]
I don't know.
I'm always the one that's like, "Nah, [bleep] that,"
but now I'm like, "I get it."
[laughs]
I kind of understand.
Parts of it could've really been things that were happening
in her real life,
and she was maybe coping with it by roleplaying it out
on the internet, which is...
- It's a coping mechanism.
- Yeah, she seems like she's in a much better place.
- It's one of those things
that I don't--
I don't care what the color of your skin is.
What does your heart say?
- Yeah, there are some things to talk about here,
but at the same time, it's, like,
I'm doing everything I can not to just be excited
because she's cute, she seems nice,
she seems to like you.
- I don't know. So what do you think?
Like, are you gonna give her a chance or...
[exciting music]
[dramatic music]
- What do you think?
Like, are you gonna give her a chance?
♪
- I do know this:
I'm open to everything, so I can...
I mean, I will talk. I'm not gonna just poof.
- However you feel, and however you wanna move forward...
♪
You should be honest about that
and be very clear and upfront with that.
I think it can just be something
that can naturally happen.
- Do you wanna message her and tell her to hop back on
and have, like, a final kind of convo
about the past, the present, and the future?
- Yeah.
[dings]
- Okay.
Here we are. We're back.
- Welcome back.
- And I would love to just let you
kind of chat with each other for a minute.
[warm music]
- Okay.
Would you say you're mad at me at this point?
- I'm just glad that we have that closure now.
We don't have that big secret that is just looming over us.
- Okay, but I am sorry that I did that to you.
- Water under the bridge.
- Okay, at the same time, like,
would you feel like
you actually were in love with Renae?
♪
- I was infatuated, you know,
you know, what you were showing me was beautiful,
but I did know, like, deep down
I enjoyed...
♪
Talking to you...
♪
Regardless of what you looked like
because, you know, we were, you know,
going back and forth just talking
as the three-dimensional avatar for months
before we actually started talking on Kik.
So yes and no.
- I mean, would you like to keep in contact with me?
I mean...
- Absolutely.
I don't know why--there would be no reason not to.
I mean, you're not some weird old man
sitting in his mother's basement
trying to fool with weird people on the internet.
- [laughs] Okay, okay, okay.
I'm sorry, I'm...
- You're fine. - That's a relief.
- Though I do have one important thing to say:
add me on your real Facebook please.
- [laughs]
For sure, for sure.
I will do that. I will do that.
- There we go, Scooba. Demanding [bleep] finally.
- Right, right. [laughter]
And, Scooba, pursuing more than a friendship,
where are you on that?
- You know, we are in different states.
I don't expect you not to be on your own dating app,
finding people local to you,
so gotta test the waters on that one.
- Like you said, just 'cause, like, we made it work back then
doesn't mean we can necessarily make it work now.
- Right.
- I think, if anything,
not pursuing this would be silly.
- Yeah.
- I'm glad, Scooba, that you are willing to pursue that
and see where that can go
even if it's just an even longer term friendship.
- Oh, yeah.
- Kishana, I wanna see you add him now.
- Mm-hmm.
- What do you use more? Facebook, Instagram?
- Damn, on the spot!
- Okay. [laughs]
- I want the digital connection official.
- [laughs]
- I can add you on Snapchat
'cause that's what I'm primarily on.
- Okay.
- All right so, Scooba, hold up your Snapchat code.
Did you find him? - Yeah, I found him.
- All right, did it work?
Let's see, I wanna see the add.
I wanna see the official.
Okay, happened. - And then accepted.
- Love it.
Okay, it's official.
This "Catfish" case is closed.
Who knows what the future might hold?
[Thomas Stubbs and Samantha Powell's "To Get to You"]
- All right, guys, all the best.
- Thank you.
- ♪ To get to you
♪ Ooh
♪
♪ To get to you
- Two years ago, Dejuan met Tynea on Tinder.
- She's an exotic dancer, so that really caught my eye.
That was, like, the icing on the cake.
- I'm sure it was.
- I do know that she has a twin sister.
- Whoa. Oh, my God.
- There's no pictures of them together.
- I'm not so sure there's even a twin sister.
- Something ain't right. [dings]
- Oh. - What the...
[upbeat music]
♪
Scooba meets Renae on a virtual social network.
- She was the love of my life,
but then one day she was gone.
- She thought about you, she found you again, like,
she wants to be in your life.
- [gasps] Shut the [bleep] up.
- Wow, that almost makes the case that Renae is legit.
- I'm very much at the edge of my seat right now.
[dings]
[dramatic music]
[upbeat music]
♪
- Let's text Kamie.
"Wassup?"
- Oh, hey. - What's up?
- What are those balloons back there?
- My birthday balloons.
- It's your birthday?
Oh, my God, I had no idea.
- Stop.
- If I would've known,
I would've had something sent to you
that's behind you that you have to go get.
- Really? - Yes.
- There's nothing in here.
- Look outside.
- [grunts]
- Let me get dressed.
- I found something.
[horn blows]
Hey!
- Happy birthday!
- Ay!
- But wait, there's more.
- Wow, look at this.
all: ♪ Happy birthday to you
♪ Happy birthday to you
[cheering]
- Thank you! [horns blowing]
all: Happy birthday, Nev! - I love you guys.
[horns blowing] - Wow.
That was fun. Thank you.
- Party's over.
- Thanks for helping make my birthday great.
Now that we've celebrated,
I think we should get to work.
Here we go. We got an email from Stephen.
"Dear Nev and Kamie,
"my name is Stephen, or as my friends call me,
"Scooba.
"I'm 23 years old,
"and I live about an hour outside of Chicago.
"I'm a groundskeeper at a golf course
"and also take care of my mom.
"Six years ago, I met a girl named Renae
"on IMVU.
We suddenly clicked and began dating."
- ♪ And I just want you to know ♪
- IMVU is like a game, right?
- It's more like a virtual world.
- ♪ And then I look up at the moon ♪
- "Renae lived in England,
"and we couldn't meet in person,
"but it didn't faze me.
"She understood me and my views on life
"in a way that no one else seemed to.
I fell in love with her."
- ♪ I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you ♪
♪ I love you
♪
- "Everything had been going well,
"but about eight months after we met,
Renae ghosted me."
- ♪ I'm alone, nothing happening on my phone ♪
- "I messaged her for weeks.
"I was heartbroken, but after five years,
suddenly, I got a message from her."
- ♪ And for a minute, I was feeling so stupid ♪
- "She said she wanted to get back in touch..."
- ♪ I reached into my heart
♪ Pulled out an arrow from Cupid ♪
- "But we haven't talked or video chatted.
"That being said,
"I still feel a connection to her.
"I'd love your help getting to the bottom of this.
Thank you, Scooba."
Wow. Let me text him.
For Renae to not talk to him for five years
and then reconnect
and still be lying again now?
It almost makes the case that Renae is legit.
- Kind of, but it's super weird.
[dings] - Oh.
Whoa! - Hello!
- Hello, Scooba Steve.
[laughter]
- How did you get the nickname Scooba?
- A few years ago, I used to work at a tire shop,
and they had three Steves working there,
and an employee just shouted, "Call him Scooba."
[laughter]
- So let's talk about this a little bit.
Very curious about this Renae.
Take us back to, like, how you guys met.
- I was on IMVU.
I was just combing through different group chats.
Then I just joined in,
and Renae and I kinda clicked.
We were the same age at the time, 17.
And then we continued it from there.
- But you didn't know what she looked like, right?
Because you only saw her little digital avatar.
- Yeah.
- Did you guys only ever talk through IMVU?
- No, eventually we moved over to Kik.
- You could send photos on Kik, right?
- Right.
- So you have seen photos of her?
- Yes. I thought she was beautiful.
- And when you guys were talking,
were you guys getting into, like, real deep stuff or...
- At the time, yes.
I mean, "What do you wanna do with your life?
Where do you see yourself in ten years?"
Basic teenager stuff.
At that time,
it was also very stressful.
Let's just say...
I haven't had the best father figures in my life,
and that was something that we very much connected with.
- And you also mentioned that you take care of your mom.
Were you dealing with that back then?
- Yes.
She is disabled, and I am her medical aide.
So the escapism talking to Renae
was kind of nice.
In my mind, I was away from home with that.
We were very much in a relationship.
- Do you ever talk on the phone?
- Well, no.
- So you've never heard her voice?
- Nope.
Like, I tried to get her on Skype,
and it was very much excuses,
but I kinda just shrugged it off
because it was still a consistent communication.
- Hmm.
- But for a while, she was your girlfriend?
So how did it end?
- I ended up talking with her brother.
The conversation was just fairly simple brotherly,
"Don't hurt my sister" stuff.
But then one day,
there was supposedly an argument happening,
and her dad got on
and started mocking me,
mocking the idea of the relationship.
It was very unsettling to me.
- How does a dad know how to use Kik?
[dramatic music]
- After that night happened, she was gone.
- She stops responding to your messages?
Wow.
And in IMVU?
- Never online again.
- So that was it?
You just stopped hearing from her.
- Just gone.
- What was that like to feel like you had this girlfriend
that you were in love with-- - Oh, it sucked.
100% sucked. It hurt a lot.
I tried for a few months
to try and see if I could get something.
Facebook, Instagram, another account,
but I couldn't find her.
- She just totally vanished?
- And then I lived my life and moved on.
- And then six years go by,
and you just get a random message?
- Yeah.
Just, "Hi, this is me. It's been a while."
Blah blah blah blah blah.
I mean, I was excited. I mean, it was cool.
I had no talked to this person in years.
- Had you thought about her? - Yeah.
I mean, she was the love of my life.
- Wow.
So give us the update on Renae.
So okay, so now she's 23. What's her deal?
- All I know is that on her Facebook,
it says she in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom,
and that is it.
It's a barebones Facebook. I'm her only friend.
That extremely brings up a red flag.
- Weird. What's her Facebook name?
Is just Renae, or does she have a last name?
- She says that it's Renae Savage.
- Oh, no.
No, Scooba.
No, that's not a good sign, honey.
- I'd like to see the profile. - We can do that.
- All right, so here she is. Okay.
[investigative music]
From Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
You're her only friend.
Has one picture.
Tattoo on her finger, nose ring.
Is this girl you remember?
- 100%, but she was a brunette. - Oh, okay.
- I mean, she's cute, obviously.
Do you have messages that we can see?
- I do.
♪
- "Well, first off, I want to say
"I'm deeply sorry, like, genuinely.
"I wanted to get in contact with you after all these years
"because I never forgot.
"I felt bad for basically everything,
"and in the moment,
I never realized how much my decisions would affect me."
- "I tried to find you back on Kik,
"after the whole ordeal.
"I messaged you once,
but your account was no longer active."
So she's saying that she was trying to find you.
- Yeah. - Allegedly.
- Yeah, allegedly.
- Do you still have your Kik account?
- Nope.
- "Renae, you were the love of my life.
"I'm honestly so speechless right now.
I can't believe we're talking to each other."
- "So you truly missed me," she said.
"I mean, we were young.
We were, like, what? 17?"
"Yeah, and?
We were married for two months."
Did you guys get married on IMVU?
- Yeah, it's a thing that you can pay for.
- Oh, my God. - Wow.
I mean, I have to say, like,
considering that you haven't talked in six years,
and you kinda just picked up where you left off,
you've gotta be excited.
- I mean, I am, but I'm also guarded.
- Right.
So all we have for this girl is this Facebook profile.
- Mm-hmm.
- Do you still have your IMVU account?
- No.
- So you no longer have access to Renae's profile then?
- No.
- We need some more information.
So I feel like we need you
to kind of try and get a little bit more info
for us if we're gonna do some research for you.
Wait, is she online? She's active right now.
- Yeah. - [gasps]
- Do you wanna see if she can chat right now?
- I mean, I could try.
- "All I really know about you
"is that you live somewhere in the UK.
"What else can you tell me about yourself?
What's your number? I'd love to hear your voice."
We've never looked up an English phone number.
- No, we haven't. Can we?
- I don't even know. Yeah, I'd be curious.
- That's if we get it.
- Come on.
- Well, she read it. - Oh, wait, she saw it.
- Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.
She's typing.
- Okay.
[all groaning]
- Come on. That is just an excuse.
- All right, so let's let her work,
and in the meantime,
we've got this photo, we've got her name.
We can do a little poking around,
see if we find something. - Right.
- We'll talk to you soon, dude.
- All right. - See you soon, Scooba.
- Later.
- I feel like Scooba's definitely getting catfished.
There's, like, no doubt about it.
- I mean, all he really knows about her
is she lives in England, and she's cute,
so it's time for Scooba
to ask some tough questions
and demand some real answers.
- ♪ You can never say never
♪ When we've been waiting forever ♪
- Put your hat on. - [sighs] Really?
- There's more surprise.
[dings] - Happy birthday, Daddy.
You gotta make a wish. You gotta make a wish.
- Okay, ready? I'm gonna blow.
You guys help me blow them?
- Blow close.
- Yay!
- Happy birthday, Daddy! We love you.
- Whoo!
- The kids are like, "Give me the doughnuts."
- [laughs] Yeah, Beau, get it.
Cleo, eat that after dinner, okay?
After dinner. - Yum!
- [gasps] - [laughs]
- Oh!
All right, the rest you can have after dinner.
All right, love you guys.
I gotta go finish working, okay?
- I love you, baby. - All right, love you guys.
- See you!
- We love you!
[upbeat music]
- All right.
Let's get down to business.
We got Scooba.
Six years ago, he was 17,
and he meets this girl named Renae.
They hit off, they talk for months,
they get really close,
and then all of a sudden, she disappears.
Fast forward to six years later,
he gets random message from a new Facebook profile
with her picture and name.
"Hey, it's me, Renae.
Do you remember from six years ago?"
- So who is this girl,
and why did she pop back up after all this time?
- This is gonna be interesting.
So what do we got?
So Renae's info.
- "Hey, I haven't heard back from Renae yet,
"but I figured I should just send you the link
"to her Facebook so you have it.
"These are the things I know about her:
"She's 23, she lives in Wolverhampton, UK,
"She's either a nurse or a nursing student,
"and her brother's name is Dylan.
"I'll let you know as soon as I hear back.
Scooba."
All right, well, let's go to her Facebook.
Let me share. Hold on.
All right, here we go.
So here she is. Okay.
There's not a lot to go off of.
From Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
One photo.
This is clearly a profile she made just for him,
but there's not nothing.
I mean, we got this photo,
so I just wanna see if this picture comes up.
What? Oh, my God.
There is one. - Shut the [bleep] up.
- There's a ton of pictures of this girl.
Acacia [bleep].
Well, that was easy.
- Oh, my God.
- Is that an Instagram?
Two million followers!
She's got two kids. She lives in Oregon.
Oh, there, look at this one. Look.
Tattoo on her finger, nose ring,
it's definitely her. - 1,000%.
- All right, I'm gonna message her.
Maybe she knows who's been stealing her pictures.
- I'm sure she has people
stealing her photos all the time.
- "Hey, Acacia,
"would love if you
can help us out."
[dings] - Ding.
- Okay, so now we know
that the girl in the pictures is Acacia.
- Mm-hmm.
- Which means now we have confirmation
that Renae is a liar.
- Pants on fire. - Ah!
- What? - Whoa, look at this.
Her Facebook URL
I mean...
- So it's [bleep] Tyana Smith.
- What? - [laughs]
- How did Scooba not notice this?
- I mean, this is, like,
such a specific place in the UK to be "from."
We need to search for Tyana Smith
in that town. - All right, yeah.
Let's look up Tyana Smith,
and let's go to city.
And what the name...
- Wolverine.
- [laughs]
Wolverhampton.
Oh, there it is!
- Oh, Bushbury. That's the one.
Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
[both gasping] - Oh, we got a hit.
There is a Tyana Smith in Wolverhampton, UK.
This is her!
- That woman is not twentysomething years old.
She's definitely older.
- If this is her, why would she be so careless?
Is it possible he's been talking to this lady
the whole time?
- There has to be a reason
why she disappeared the first time around.
Maybe they realized that he was too young,
and they were, like, "Eh," but now that he's older...
- Oh.
- They're trying to creep back in.
- Interesting.
Obviously, if they lied about their picture,
then it totally makes sense
that it could be an older woman.
- Poor Scooba. Something's up.
[dramatic music]
- So now we know that Renae
has been lying at least about the photos.
I think we should tell Scooba
that we've searched the photo,
and it immediately brought us back this girl.
- And even crazier,
I think we should also be like,
"Hey, did you see Tyana Smith?"
It's right there on Renae's URL,
and it led us right to an older woman
in Wolverhampton, UK.
That's going to flip Scooba out.
- All right, let me text Scooba.
"Hey, buddy, let's get back to work."
I mean, I think him knowing that she's lying
at least about the photos
will give him a little bit of motivation
to press her now.
[dings]
- Hello. both: Hey.
- We're back.
- Welcome back. - How are you doing?
- I'm kind of going with the flow.
- Well, we've got some things to talk about.
- Okay.
- We took the photo from her Facebook page,
and we did an image search, and it came back right away.
The image search brought a bunch of photos up...
- Oh, wow.
- Of some other girl,
and we found her Instagram.
Her name is Acacia. She's verified.
She's got millions of followers.
She's got two kids, but here she is.
This is the girl. - Huh.
Weird.
- So we now know
Renae is at the very least lying about...
- Who she is. Yeah.
- I messaged Acacia on Instagram.
- Okay. - Because I--
We were hoping that maybe we could talk to her,
and see if she knows anything about Renae,
but I haven't heard anything back.
The other thing that jumped out at us
when we went to Renae's Facebook page
is the URL. - Mm.
Did you notice that? - I didn't,
'cause I've only really looked at it in the app,
and the app doesn't necessarily give you a URL.
- I mean, that's pretty weird.
- Mm-hmm.
That's intriguing.
- Do you know a Tyana Smith?
- No.
- So we searched for Tyana Smith
from Bushbury, Wolverhampton.
It brought us to this profile.
♪
- Wow.
- This woman is clearly not 23.
We don't know for sure if it's her,
but what if they are older than they said that they were?
- If they're much older than me now,
they were much older than me then,
and then that just turns into,
"Why were you that age pretending to be that age
when I was honest about my age?"
- Right, right.
Very creepy, very weird.
[dings] - Oh.
I got a response from Acacia.
- Oh? - Oh?
- "Hi, oh, my goodness, of course.
Let me know what I can do. I'm free now."
Should we invite her to join our Zoom?
- Yeah, we might as well.
- "For sure. Hopping on now."
All right, get ready. Scooba, you're about to meet
the girl whose photos you fell in love with.
- Mm.
- I'm nervous now. [dings]
- Oh! - Oh!
- Hey. - Hello.
- Hi.
- What's up? - Hello.
- Hi.
- It's Acacia, right?
- Yeah, hi.
- So hello, I'm Nev, and this is Kamie.
- I'm Scooba. - Hi.
- Welcome to "Catfish."
- Cool. - Aw.
Did you ever think you would end up on it?
- Um, to be honest,
yeah, I've kind of been waiting for this moment.
- Is that because people use your pictures
to make fake profiles a lot? - Yeah.
Like, for, like, ten years of my life.
- Wow.
- We're working on an episode right now,
and we're helping Scooba out.
He's been talking to a girl named Renae.
So they talked for, like, eight months in 2014,
it got really serious... - Okay.
- We started talking on
the virtual dating app, IMVU.
We started dating, and then we moved over to Kik.
- Gotcha.
- And then she disappeared.
- And then six years go by,
and she pops up out of nowhere
using a blonde photo of you.
♪
- Still claims her name is Renae.
There's only one photo,
and we ran that photo,
and it right away brought us to you.
- Okay.
- So we know this girl's obviously not you.
- Yeah.
- Unless you've been pretending to be a girl named Renae
and talking to Scooba for the last six years.
- [stammering] I have not. - [laughs]
- Have you had any interaction with
or known of any of these people,
and have you dealt with any of them?
- Um, no, so I, like,
I would get messages every now and then
even today saying, like--
which is funny that you mention it, Kik.
People would be like, "We talked on Kik, like...
And I'm like,
and now it's making me nervous 'cause you say 2014 and Kik,
and I'm like, "Oh, goodness.
Like, is it the same person that's been doing this?"
- [sighs]
- But my picture's on Tumblr.
That's where most of them began.
Um, they kind of just blew up,
and they just were spread all over Facebook pages and stuff.
So, like, I became this, like, stock photo image
that nobody really knew who I was.
They just recognized my face. - Saw your face.
- Yeah. - Right.
- And so those pictures just went everywhere,
and then they became so many things
that just weren't me.
- Do you remember anyone ever saying
they were talking to you,
and they thought your name was Renae?
- No, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I remember at one point
my dad and I sat down,
and we, like, counted the Facebook pages one day
that used my picture, and it was, like, up in the 500s.
[tense music]
So... [laughs]
- Wow.
- What?
- That's insane.
- Like, they just found your face,
which is obviously a perfect face--
like, you look like an elven princess...
- Very symmetrical.
- From "Lord of the Rings" or something.
- [laughs] - Very symmetrical, yeah.
- So it makes sense.
- "Very symmetrical." [laughs]
- So you don't know Renae,
but does the name Tyana Smith,
does that ring a bell?
- No, I don't know any of those people.
- [sighs]
- All right. Very nice to meet you.
- Yes, very nice to meet you.
- I'm so sorry this happened to you.
- Thank you.
- Thanks for helping us out.
- Bye. Thank you.
- Bye.
[somber music]
- [sighs] Wow.
- Yeah.
- How are you feeling about all this so far?
- ♪ Hold my breath in
- It is a bummer. It is a bummer.
- ♪ While she rips my heart out ♪
- I'm--I'm in a mixture
of frustrated,
relieved that I got some truth,
and um, accepting that truth.
- ♪ Watch me as
♪ My world burns down
- Why disrupt somebody's life
after six years to just continue a lie?
- ♪ Though my heart is telling me to go ♪
- I'm sorry, Scooba.
- That was--it was a lot.
- ♪ That you sunk my ship
♪ And then you let me drown
- I'm sorry, Scooba.
This was, like, a lot.
- Why disrupt somebody's life
after six years to just continue a lie
when you could just come out straight who you are?
[somber music]
I'm now at the point
where I just kinda wanna know.
'Cause she's already lied to me about her face,
what else could she be lying to me about, you know?
- Right.
- What if it's not Tyana Smith?
What if it is a girl you age,
but she looks nothing like Acacia?
How much would that even matter to you?
Like, at the beginning of all this,
for a good six months,
you guys were just avatars,
and you didn't know what each other looked like.
- We would have to start over.
A new level of trust would have to be built.
- Clearly, she's drawn to you.
She's thought about you, she found you again.
Like, she wants to be in your life.
So in a way, you do have some leverage.
- Or is she playing a mind game?
- Well, yeah, but even if she's just playing a mind game,
the fact that she came back to you after six years
suggests that you have significance to her.
- She has something to say to you.
She has something to say to you.
[dings]
- Well, she just messaged me that she's on break.
- All right, share that "scween."
Let's try to get as much information
as we can out of her.
Things that we could search, locations, screennames.
We need more clues.
It feels like it's gonna take some pushing,
and you're gonna have to, you know, really--
I don't wanna say demand, but...
- Push it. - Yeah.
Pressure her to give you some answers.
- You can't scare her away. You've gotta lube it up first.
This situation needs lube.
- All right, guys.
- How about, do you still live in the UK?
- Her Facebook page says she does.
- She's a [bleep] liar. We know this to be true.
[dings] - Oh, oh!
- Oh, she said, "Yeah, why you ask?"
- "Just curious."
- [laughs]
- We have to butter her up. What do you want me to say?
- I'm ready to [bleep] go in hard.
I don't know why we're playing games with this girl.
When she popped back up,
she had her chance to come clean, and she [bleep] blew it.
- Right, I mean, I'm ready to go balls to the wall.
- Not out the gate!
- We're going in too hard,
but we're definitely, like, making it clear
that we're not [bleep] around anymore.
Next question.
Is Renae your real name?
'Cause your Facebook profile URL is Tyana Smith.
[dings] - Right.
[gasps] Ooh, ooh, ooh. - Oh.
- "Yes, silly. My Facebook email
is the same one I used for my IMVU if you remember that."
- I don't remember that.
- Be like, "Oh, I don't remember.
What was that again?"
- Oh, oh. - Ah, ah!
- What?
- That's an old IMVU photo.
- Whoa.
- No, she's trying to [bleep] derail us.
That's not what we asked.
- You're right, she is trying to change the topic.
So say, "Oh, my God. Crazy.
What was your username?"
- Oh, she's responding.
[dramatic music]
"Hold on. Let me look."
So she's still on there.
- I personally wouldn't know.
I'm glad I haven't gone back.
- "So I have to get back to work now,
but I'll send you that username when I find it."
- Oh, God.
- Okay, we need the [bleep] username
so that we can look her up
and see if there's any more information about her
in her bio,
and unfortunately, we're kind of, like,
at her beck and call right now. - Yeah.
And she's supposedly "at work,"
so she's not gonna reply.
- If we believe that she's in the UK,
it's late now. It's evening.
Whatever she wants us to believe,
we'll pretend that that's what's happening.
- Yeah.
- So I would say, leave it alone.
- We wait for her to give the username.
We need the username. It's all we need.
- Right, let's see if she gets that to us.
So we'll see if she gets back to you,
we'll meet back up tomorrow,
and I do think you'll have to make it very clear
that if you're gonna move forward,
in a friendship, or a relationship, or whatever...
- You need to be honest. - Exactly.
- We'll figure out where this leads.
- So yeah, I guess we'll talk to you in the morning.
- See you tomorrow.
I tell you,
Scooba has major firewalls.
He's not allowing for any type of encryption [bleep].
- Although, he does have one vulnerability: Renae.
- Mm-hmm. [cell phone dings]
- Oh, he said she just messaged her username.
- Ooh!
- Do you wanna quickly look up that username?
- Yes. - IMVU.
- Because you can't just Google her username.
You have to be on IMVU in order to search her.
- Right, right.
"Glow up your avatar in 3D."
Whoa.
- We have to create a character.
We have to make one.
- All right. Should we be male or female?
- Make me, make me.
- All right, female. - Female.
- Hair, what are you looking for?
- Oh, this is so fun.
I'm definitely doing this later.
Ooh, do the wavy hair. Cute.
- I don't know. Okay, that's fine.
All right.
- You're just gonna make her a basic bitch?
- Yes. - What?
- We're on a mission here, Kamie.
Are we in?
- Could've at least given her a blouse.
Maybe a skirt.
Some nail polish?
- All right, so here is Renae's profile name.
- Look at all the basic bitches that look exactly like us.
- All right, let's see.
[gasps] There it is.
- [gasps] What? Antarctica?
- That's gotta be a joke. Wow.
- That's her. - Ooh, there's a phone number!
- [gasps]
That's definitely not a UK number.
- That's true.
Let's search this number. - Run the number.
[exciting music]
Ooh.
♪
- No name associated with this number.
Look at this.
It's a Virginia cell phone number.
- Not a text app? - It's a Verizon phone number.
She's not in the UK,
'cause the phone number is a U.S. number from Virginia.
Does that mean Tyana Smith from Wolverhampton is not her?
- It still means she's a liar!
She has a real number that she could've given to him
if she really wanted to talk to him,
but she doesn't. Something is wrong.
- She's not in the UK,
she's not the Tyana lady we found,
so who is she?
[dings]
- Oh, there she is.
[warm music]
She ready?
- She ready.
- All right, so here's what we got.
Obviously, we know the girl in the picture is Acacia,
this other girl,
but there's very little information
that we actually have about Renae,
except we found her IMVU profile,
and she does put phone number on there,
which is an American cell phone.
So not only is Renae lying about who she is,
she's also lying about where she is.
Let me text our guy here and get him back.
- Scooba.
Abracadabra.
Scooba-doo! [dings]
- Hi, guys. - Hi.
- Hey.
We do have some things to discuss.
Before we do that, have you talked to...
- No, no, I have not. - No.
Okay, looking back
on what we discovered yesterday,
how has that filtered down
and kind of changed your feelings
about this whole situation?
- Well, I'm kind of riding the waves
and see where this goes.
- Do you have any other friends of family
that know about Renae?
- No, other than my mom.
- Well, what does she think?
- Would you like to talk to her?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, I would love to meet your mom.
- All right, let me go get her.
- What's her name? - Charity.
- [gasps] ♪ Oh, my goodness
- It's very nice to meet you, Mom.
- Very nice to meet you both too.
- Good to meet you.
So what do you know about this Renae,
and what do you think about it?
- Well, he's the type of kid that gets attached easily
if he finds connection.
I do want to him to be with someone that he connects with,
I do, 'cause he doesn't have the exact easy life.
I do have
mental illness issues.
- Yeah.
- So it's hard, and I just feel the need
to make sure that my son doesn't fall on his face
because he does wear his heart on his sleeve.
- Well, we're gonna help him figure out
who this Renae girl is.
We have a little bit of new information for him
we wanna go over so that he can forge ahead.
Great meeting you though. Thank you.
- Lovely meeting you guys too.
- Thanks, Mom. Bye.
- Bye. - And she's so sweet.
- All right, well, interestingly,
yesterday when you asked Renae about her IMVU,
she provided her profile,
and when we searched the screenname,
it comes up with her profile.
So there's still a little bit of information on here.
It's not much, but it does have a phone number.
- Really?
- Obviously, this wasn't here when you talked to her
six years ago.
- So we looked up this phone number.
It came back unknown,
but it turns out it's a Virginia cell phone number.
- Oh, wow.
- And you did ask her as well, like,
"Are you still in the UK?" And she said, "Yes,"
but this says she's in Virginia.
- That's very interesting.
- The good news is, now there's potentially a way to reach her
other than Facebook if we need it.
- Right.
- Major, major parts of what you thought you knew
about this girl seem to not be true.
- Yeah, at all.
- And that feels to me like it's some, you know,
it gives some real ammunition
to kinda show our cards and say, "Hey, look,
"we know you're not the girl in the pictures.
"We spoke to her.
We know you have a U.S. phone number."
- Now we can let the hammer down.
- So you wanna start from your phone?
Because I like the idea
of you doing this first for you,
and she should do what's right by you
because you're the person she's been talking to.
- Agreed.
[dramatic music]
- All right, she is active right now.
- Oh, great. - Ooh.
- "Hello Renae, I video chatted with Acacia yesterday.
"I know you haven't been telling me the truth
"about who you are,
"and I wanna give you that chance to come clean.
It's now or never."
- Whoa. Wow, I love it.
No hesitation.
He just [bleep] jams that send button.
- Ah, she read it! - Oh!
- Oh, oh, she saw it, she saw it.
- Oh, my God.
- I'm very much at the edge of my seat right now.
- "Wow. Give me a second."
- I've given you six years.
- I think you should now say, "If you're ready to do this,
let's do it, you know, face to face."
And now send the Zoom link.
- Oh, she read it.
- Oh, oh!
- Ooh, she's typing, she's typing, she's typing.
- Oh, yeah.
♪
Oh, my goodness. - [gasps]
- All right.
Scooba, are you ready to, like,
hold her feet to the fire
and ask her some tough questions?
- Oh, yeah. - Collective deep breath.
[all inhale]
[all exhale]
That was nice.
- Oh, oh.
- Hi. - Hi.
- Hello. - Hi.
- Hello, hello.
♪
- Are you the person Scooba has been talking to?
- Yeah.
- You're clearly not the person
that is on your Facebook.
♪
- Okay, hold on a second.
I just wanna take a second
to kinda just let Renae introduce herself
because I don't even think we know your real name.
Can you just give us a quick overview of who you are,
what your name is, where you live,
just so we know who we're talking to?
- Oh, okay, my name is Kishana.
I'm from Roanoke, Virginia,
and I am Haitian American.
- Are you in classroom?
- Are you in school right now? - Yeah.
- Well, school session is out,
but I am in a study room.
- Why lie? [laughs]
- So I've asked myself that a lot of times,
but at the time...
I wasn't so comfortable in my skin,
and I wasn't really comfortable with myself,
so it was easier for me to put on a different persona
than to be myself.
- What aspects did you lie
and what aspect did you tell the truth about to me?
- Okay, so the lies were,
um, the part about, like,
my brother that you remember.
- Wait, did your brother actually text Stephen?
- No. - No?
- No.
- So that was you?
- Yeah, it was me.
♪
- Did I ever speak to your dad?
- No.
- No? Okay.
- Mm.
- Yeah.
- Why?
- Yeah, why?
- I felt like I couldn't keep up with it anymore,
so it was just so much easier
to just drop it and act like it never happened.
I'm sorry, that's just how I thought at the time.
- What about your URL
on Facebook for Renae is, like, a Tyana Smith?
Who is that?
- Honestly, when I was with my ex-boyfriend,
and I was suspecting he was doing something,
so I made to message him at the time.
- Okay.
- I can understand why as a teenager
you weren't ready to come clean,
but why not reach out
at this point now as yourself?
- When I initially texted you,
I was, like, I'm gonna be like,
"Okay, I'm just gonna tell him. I'm gonna let him know."
But, like, the more that I talked to you,
it was easier to be Renae with you
than it would've been easier for me to be, like,
Kishana with you,
'cause even though we're the same,
I just felt like you're connected with her
and not with me, if that makes sense.
- Are you talking about a physical connection?
- Yeah, that was, like,
that was kind of, like, a part of me, 'cause I was like,
"Oh, my gosh, like,
"what if, like, how I look doesn't amount to, like,
how she looks, and he's completely devastated?"
Basically, I made it 'cause at the time...
I was like,
"Oh, it would just be so much more easier, like...
Nobody gotta know, like..."
Like, I could've just been somebody else.
- I know Black girl to Black girl
on the internet,
it can be difficult to make friends as yourself,
especially in these virtual worlds.
You're on these apps and playing these games,
and you subconsciously make a white character
because you feel like it might be more presentable
or people will want to talk to you more,
but in the beginning, when you guys met on IMVU,
he didn't know what you looked like for six months.
You could've looked like anybody.
He could've been completely into you as you.
- Part of me just didn't want to, like,
let him know 'cause I was like,
"We've already come so far, like,
like, why just break that now?"
- Hmm.
- What were your feelings for him then
and what your feelings for him now?
- I did love you.
Indeed, I did.
Reconnecting with you now,
it made me miss how you treated me.
I would like to get to know you again.
I would love to, like, start something with Stephen,
and if you're willing and open to,
I do see that in our future.
Maybe there could be something there again.
♪
- I wanna just check in with Steve.
Hang tight.
We'll come back to you in a few minutes
after we chat quickly.
- All right, sounds great.
[dings] - [sighs]
I don't know.
I'm always the one that's like, "Nah, [bleep] that,"
but now I'm like, "I get it."
[laughs]
I kind of understand.
Parts of it could've really been things that were happening
in her real life,
and she was maybe coping with it by roleplaying it out
on the internet, which is...
- It's a coping mechanism.
- Yeah, she seems like she's in a much better place.
- It's one of those things
that I don't--
I don't care what the color of your skin is.
What does your heart say?
- Yeah, there are some things to talk about here,
but at the same time, it's, like,
I'm doing everything I can not to just be excited
because she's cute, she seems nice,
she seems to like you.
- I don't know. So what do you think?
Like, are you gonna give her a chance or...
[exciting music]
[dramatic music]
- What do you think?
Like, are you gonna give her a chance?
♪
- I do know this:
I'm open to everything, so I can...
I mean, I will talk. I'm not gonna just poof.
- However you feel, and however you wanna move forward...
♪
You should be honest about that
and be very clear and upfront with that.
I think it can just be something
that can naturally happen.
- Do you wanna message her and tell her to hop back on
and have, like, a final kind of convo
about the past, the present, and the future?
- Yeah.
[dings]
- Okay.
Here we are. We're back.
- Welcome back.
- And I would love to just let you
kind of chat with each other for a minute.
[warm music]
- Okay.
Would you say you're mad at me at this point?
- I'm just glad that we have that closure now.
We don't have that big secret that is just looming over us.
- Okay, but I am sorry that I did that to you.
- Water under the bridge.
- Okay, at the same time, like,
would you feel like
you actually were in love with Renae?
♪
- I was infatuated, you know,
you know, what you were showing me was beautiful,
but I did know, like, deep down
I enjoyed...
♪
Talking to you...
♪
Regardless of what you looked like
because, you know, we were, you know,
going back and forth just talking
as the three-dimensional avatar for months
before we actually started talking on Kik.
So yes and no.
- I mean, would you like to keep in contact with me?
I mean...
- Absolutely.
I don't know why--there would be no reason not to.
I mean, you're not some weird old man
sitting in his mother's basement
trying to fool with weird people on the internet.
- [laughs] Okay, okay, okay.
I'm sorry, I'm...
- You're fine. - That's a relief.
- Though I do have one important thing to say:
add me on your real Facebook please.
- [laughs]
For sure, for sure.
I will do that. I will do that.
- There we go, Scooba. Demanding [bleep] finally.
- Right, right. [laughter]
And, Scooba, pursuing more than a friendship,
where are you on that?
- You know, we are in different states.
I don't expect you not to be on your own dating app,
finding people local to you,
so gotta test the waters on that one.
- Like you said, just 'cause, like, we made it work back then
doesn't mean we can necessarily make it work now.
- Right.
- I think, if anything,
not pursuing this would be silly.
- Yeah.
- I'm glad, Scooba, that you are willing to pursue that
and see where that can go
even if it's just an even longer term friendship.
- Oh, yeah.
- Kishana, I wanna see you add him now.
- Mm-hmm.
- What do you use more? Facebook, Instagram?
- Damn, on the spot!
- Okay. [laughs]
- I want the digital connection official.
- [laughs]
- I can add you on Snapchat
'cause that's what I'm primarily on.
- Okay.
- All right so, Scooba, hold up your Snapchat code.
Did you find him? - Yeah, I found him.
- All right, did it work?
Let's see, I wanna see the add.
I wanna see the official.
Okay, happened. - And then accepted.
- Love it.
Okay, it's official.
This "Catfish" case is closed.
Who knows what the future might hold?
[Thomas Stubbs and Samantha Powell's "To Get to You"]
- All right, guys, all the best.
- Thank you.
- ♪ To get to you
♪ Ooh
♪
♪ To get to you
- Two years ago, Dejuan met Tynea on Tinder.
- She's an exotic dancer, so that really caught my eye.
That was, like, the icing on the cake.
- I'm sure it was.
- I do know that she has a twin sister.
- Whoa. Oh, my God.
- There's no pictures of them together.
- I'm not so sure there's even a twin sister.
- Something ain't right. [dings]
- Oh. - What the...
[upbeat music]
♪