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It’s Cheat Week at Mashable. Join us as we take a look at how liars, scammers, grifters, and everyday people take advantage of life's little loopholes in order to get ahead.

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Ten years ago I was a World of Warcraftsugar baby.

I coasted through the game by pretending that behind the hot Night Elf huntress, I was a confident 21-year-old woman instead of a clumsy 13-year-old who once panic-cried over ordering pizza because talking on the phone crushed me with anxiety. My nascent and short-lived grifting never reached its full potential — mostly because I wasn't allowed online after 9 p.m. — but the year I spent exploiting my character's violet body for valuable in-game gold toed the line between shared fantasy and catfishing.

A catfish "sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes," according to Merriam-Webster. Under this definition, my World of Warcraftsugar babying wasn't quite catfishing — I wasn't stealing photos or making fake social media accounts, but I wasagreeing to flirt for cash from behind an elfin mask. Admittedly, I didn't use my real name, but who does that in a manmade world where you can cast spells and ride giant birds?

The fourth Urban Dictionary definition of a catfish is less forgiving, and possibly more accurate: "To give the impression of being an attractive person in order to attract someone online while being a complete or near opposite of that portrayed."

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My scamming didn't last long or carry over into any uncomfortable offline interactions. But it was all so easy. If you were a scantily clad female character milling around a populated area with high-level players, someone was bound to slid into your whispers — essentially in-game DMs — with a proposition. When I noticed other characters literally dancing on tavern tables, I did the same. When my character mimicked the French singer Alizee's choreography to "J'en Ai Marre," male characters struck up a conversation over direct message. In exchange for some classic online flirting — I sent messages like "yeah im hot, im 21" and "u sound cute" — interactions would blossom into gifts of gold, rare items, and offers of mentorship.

"There's power involved, whether you're a hot girl or a rich guy."

But why was I, the antithesis of middle-school cool, confident enough to get up on a table and dance for gold? I was a church kid, painfully awkward, and still carried a backpack larger than my torso. If I made eye contact with a crush, let alone sent flirty messages, I probably would have set myself on fire.

Elizabeth Kromhout, a marriage and family therapist who specializes in treating adolescents, thinks teenagers catfish in video games for a variety of reasons. Insecurity and boredom may play a part, but she emphasizes the empowerment of doing something naughty your parents don't know about.

"There's power involved, whether you're a hot girl or a rich guy," she explained in a phone interview. "A hot 21-year-old is basically the ideal female figure in our American society — especially younger kids, we're bombarded by this ideal. That's the only thing they can subconsciously think of — why don't I be a hot 21-year-old? I can get everything then."

Honestly, who hasn't catfished in games?

I wasn't the only one playing older guys.

Austin, a 23-year-old cis man who asked to withhold his last name, played World of Warcraft and RuneScapethroughout middle school and high school. He used to catfish for free gear and gold whenever he created new characters "as a way to quick start the account."

"Smart way to get a boost but looking back, probably not the uh ... most moral thing to do," he said in a Twitter DM.

Alejandro, another 23-year-old cis man, remembers when he wasn't allowed into a guild, he made a female Blood Elf mage to befriend the guild master, become his online girlfriend, and "rose the ranks of the guild." From there, he snagged rare gems, recipes, and the highest-level crafted gear from the guild's vaults and mailed it to his main account.

"[I] let him escort me through a couple low-level raids," Alejandro said in a Facebook message. Once he sent a few messages like, "I think I want to hang out with you more" the deal was "done," he said.

Should we have felt bad for taking advantage of these innocent players who just wanted a hot elf GF? I only carried on a handful of "relationships" like this, and they never lasted more than a few hours or days. I justified it as a low stakes dick move, since nobody reallygets that emotionally invested in such a short amount of time. In retrospect, I know what I did was wrong, but at the time, I didn't feel any remorse.

Kromhout noted that teenagers don't have the capacity for empathy that adults do, since the part of the brain that processes emotion and rational thought doesn't finish developing until 24 or 25.

"Teenagers are notoriously narcissistic," she said. "They can only see things through their own lens, and they're not very good at empathizing with other people unless they're trying to. I think a lot of times they hurt other people and it never registers."

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That doesn't mean teenagers are almost-grown pyschopaths, but they do struggle to see another side's perspective. At the same time, wouldn't these rich, high-level benefactors know what they're getting into?

"I don't feel that bad for them, because they were engaging in this dynamic willingly."

Amy, the 22-year-old host of the podcast Tranifesto, felt a little guilty playing male characters into giving her gold, but felt worse when they gave her "super valuable things" that were harder to obtain, like rare items. But even then, her sympathy for those "Azeroth sugar daddies" is limited.

"This was an exchange, where we got gold and gear and they received attention from someone they could plausibly convince themselves was someone they wanted, who wanted them," Amy said in a Twitter DM. "Alongside the gratification and ego boost of being this big powerful high level man/elf bestowing gifts upon needy women. Like an actual sugar daddy, I don't feel thatbad for them, because they were engaging in this dynamic willingly and probably getting their own sort of value from it."

When an innocent game becomes dangerous

I'm fortunate in that I never felt threatened while pulling off my micro-scams, but nothing on the internet is sacred — not even scamming. When my "Azeroth sugar daddy" became too pushy, I blocked and moved on.

But Amy's experience was less clean cut; in some cases, hers pushed for personal information and sent graphic sexts.

"It's sort of disturbing to think about how desensitized I got to this stuff so young," she said, remembering how someone even followed her character around. "Once I got more serious about the game I never would have done this on a character I had any attachment to, my main or whatever, for that reason."

For the teenage boys doing it, catfishing was an eye-opening experience. Jarvis, a 23-year-old cis man who asked to use a pseudonym, played a hot Blood Elf paladin in World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. When he was "probably 11 or 12," his guildmates coaxed him into scamming a male-presenting Tauren outside the Orgrimmar auction house.

"[He] gave me five gold and hit on me, which was really my first time realizing that women were really treated differently and worse than men," Jarvis said in a Twitter DM, remembering how whispers in questing areas made him uncomfortable. "At some point, the IRL women in our guild and the in-game female presenting/IRL men in our guild def had a talk about how generally shitty being in the vicinity of womanhood was in-game."

In other words, being a woman on the internet can be generally shitty.

Getting another perspective

Kromhout says getting a taste of what another gender experiences can be beneficial for developing teenage brains into well-rounded ones. Although catfishing in fantasy worlds isn't necessarily what she'd prescribe, she does acknowledge that teenage boys may be able to better empathize with their female peers if they saw the gravity of their online harassment. And besides all that, it's not that big of a deal to play as someone you're not.

"I think old-school society gets so caught up on male or female," she said.

Playing as a female character was eye-opening in a different way for Amy, who's trans. While presenting as a teenage boy in real life, she inexplicably felt drawn to playing female characters in games.

"If you asked little 14-year-old me why I was doing that, I probably would have deflected."

"I didn't really put two and two together at the time, but I always, always, always played a female character," Amy said. She stopped using female toons around age 15, when she began taking the game more seriously and used voice chats to keep up with team members during raids. "I would let people just assume I was a girl and would pick vaguely feminine names, but if you asked little 14-year-old me why I was doing that, I probably would have deflected."

Playing a hot elf wasn't necessarily the catalyst for Amy to come to terms with her gender identity, but she sees the experience as a "piece in the puzzle."

"Cishet dudes don't usually fully pretend to be women online for years, but it was like, 'Wow, that weird shit from when I was a kid makes a bit more sense now,'" she joked.

Catfishing just isn't the same anymore

That carefree grifting belongs to a simpler internet. Scams or not, people could get away with carrying on with online relationships without the burden of social media presences. Even though teenagers had Myspace and Facebook accounts a decade ago, social media was a novelty, not a ubiquitous lifestyle staple. The threat of doxxing wasn't nearly as much of a threat as it is in 2019, and nobody worried that their private Instagram or Snapchat accounts could be used against them.

Gamergate, a vile 2014 harassment campaign against video game designer Zoe Quinn sparked by her ex-boyfriend, was a wake-up call for teenagers who believed their digital selves would never intersect with their real life. Jarvis remembers that when he was playing as a sexy lady paladin, most of the users on his server hadn't joined Facebook yet.

"The mindset of players even hitting on female toons was very much relegated to roleplay or the limitations of like, Web 2.0 forum-based communications," he said. He still plays as female characters, but refrains from sugar babying like he used to because it makes him feel guilty. "Social media def[initely] made all that worse."

Amy points out that a decade ago, World of Warcraft'sparent company Blizzard didn't integrate user accounts and user's friend lists across all their games, and players could be truly anonymous. Now, she says, online activity is somehow always tied to an actual identity. That's not to say that anonymity is absolutely impossible, but there's an unwritten social agreement that some part of your online identity should be real.

"There is power involved, and it's intoxicating."

"Social media and linked accounts weren't this inescapable mark following you around everywhere online," she said. "People are also just less likely to believe that you're who you claim you are, unless you have other social media to back it up. That integrated, expansive online identity is what people expect these days."

While morally questionable, the year I spent catfishing on World of Warcraftboosted my shaky pubescent confidence in a way that no American Girl self-help book could. Kromhout was right — there ispower involved, and it's intoxicating. I eventually grew up and went outside, leaving my immense social anxiety (and the Night Elf) to exist in a limbo I avoid thinking about until I'm on the verge of falling asleep.

Amy's affection for the game is more personal than just a confidence boost, because it provided a platform for her to escape and "try on experiences."

"Stuff like Omegle and WoWcatfishing ... definitely did some damage to me as an impressionable young teen, but they also gave me this chance to have high-risk social experiences with lower stakes."

After all, who wouldn't want to galavant through glittering forests in nothing but a leather bikini?

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