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The thrill of mystery isn't new. Neither is lying. Catalina Toma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies online dating, has found that deceptions are frequent but subtle: a 2008 study she co-wrote found that 81% lie about their age, weight or height. Big-fraud catfish are outliers. (Schulman gets e-mails from people in healthy online relationships and people who have unmasked their catfish independently, but those folks don't make it onto TV.) Even so, fabrications are about psychology, not technology. "People lie about these things in face-to-face dates. They lied about these things in video dates back in the '80s," Toma says. "I don't necessarily expect those patterns to change."
Neither does Schulman. No matter how many seasons of Catfish air, he believes the phenomenon will endure--someone somewhere will open a message from a stranger and decide to take a risk and write back.
"How much longer can we make this show before people stop falling in love online?" he asks again. "I think people will always be looking to fall in love. People will always hope for things to get better. For better or worse, there will always be people who may or may not look to take advantage of that."