Tobiloba (24) thought she was living every teenager’s dream when her longtime crush suddenly started calling her out of the blue. For six months, she poured her heart into late-night conversations, shared updates with her friends and imagined a budding romance. 

But during a confession night, she learned a humiliating truth: the boy she’d developed feelings for wasn’t who she thought he was. In this story, she shares how a harmless crush became a hostel-wide prank, the betrayal that hurt more than the catfishing itself, and why she still struggles to trust people she meets online. 

This is Tobiloba’s story, as told to Betty.

I went to an all-girls Catholic secondary school, and like every other teenage girl, I had a crush on a friend named Joseph*. One day, in SS3,  during one of those random girl-to-girl conversations, I told my close friend, Priscilla*, all about him. I mentioned how I’d met him before, and that I liked him. She told me about her own crush, and that was the end of the conversation. Or so I thought.

A few weeks later, I got the shock of my life.

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Back then, phones weren’t allowed in school, but everybody had their ways around the rules. I had a tiny phone hidden away that I used to call my friends outside school from time to time. One night in January 2019, my phone rang. When I picked up, the deep voice on the other end sounded like Joseph. I thought he got my number from a mutual friend, so I didn’t bother asking any questions. We started talking, and I was so excited that I had goosebumps. 

I couldn’t believe my crush not only reciprocated my feelings but also called me. I excitedly went to tell Priscilla and my other close friends about it. They were excited for me and even teased me about my crush. 

Over the next six months, Joseph and I talked on the phone almost every evening. We talked about everything. It was the first time I had ever experienced any kind of romance, so I was incredibly vulnerable with him. I told him things and revealed parts of myself I hadn’t even shown my friends. To me, he was my boyfriend, and we shared something special. I would shyly tell my friends about him, and they would tease me and support me.

After we finished our final exams, we had a “confession night”, a free day where people would confess any offences they’d gotten away with over the course of the school year and ask for forgiveness. I always looked forward to it because it was so dramatic and funny.

To my surprise, my own friend group came to me asking for forgiveness. I had no idea why, and when I asked, their response blew me away. The Joseph that I’d spent months talking to and pouring my heart out to wasn’t real.

According to them, at the start of the year, the group had gotten together and talked about playing a prank on someone. Priscilla suggested that they prank me. They decided to use the information I‘d confided in her about my crush on Joseph against me, and that’s how the calls began. We stayed in different hostels, and so each night after I went back to mine, they would go to the box room in their hostel and call me as “Joseph”. They faked his voice, put me on loudspeaker and let me be vulnerable.

The worst part was that everyone else knew, and no one told me. I was the butt of everyone’s joke. 

I remember laughing when they told me all this. Not because it was funny, but I genuinely couldn’t process what I was hearing. I kept thinking and hoping they were joking. I didn’t scream or get angry. I just went back to my room. It took a while to sink in. I kept replaying everything in my head.

Every phone call, every time I rushed over to tell my friends what “Joseph” had said.

The embarrassment hit me like a truck. I felt like everyone had been laughing at me behind my back. What made it worse was that most of them never apologised properly; they thought it was funny.

Only a few of them involved in the prank confessed that night and moved on. Some of them reached out years later to apologise again. One said she’d only recently realised how horrible the whole thing was and was sorry. But at the time it happened? Almost nobody seemed to understand how deeply humiliating it was.

For a long time, I thought I’d moved on from it. Then, about a year later, during the pandemic, it suddenly hit me all over again. I couldn’t believe people I called my closest friends would do that to me. That’s when I realised I’d never properly processed it.

The experience affected me more than I initially realised. I’m extremely suspicious of anything I see online. Pictures, voice and video calls aren’t enough to convince me. I need to know someone who can confirm the truth for me in real life. I don’t trust a single person I meet online until I can verify their identity. And to think this was before AI.

Even now, I rarely make friends online. When I do, I constantly ask for confirmation before I believe them. 

People laugh when I tell them this story because it sounds ridiculous, and sometimes, I laugh too. But underneath the humour is a genuine sense of betrayal.

The people who suggested me as a target for this were my friends, and they were the same people laughing behind my back. It’s hard to come out of that unscathed.

I’ve forgiven most of them because I believe carrying that anger forever would only hurt me, but I put a lot of distance between myself and those people.

Still, whenever I think about it, one question always comes to mind:

If I had done the same thing to them, would they still have been my friends?

I don’t think so.

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