When sophomore Hannah LeBlanc innocently answered a friend request from a guy who “looked very attractive in his profile pics”, she was shocked to find out after numerous chat sessions that he was, in fact, fake.

“Maybe he was going to end up being my perfect husband, but now I’ll never know. I’m pretty mad,” says LeBlanc. This  story illustrates a trend of countless fake accounts set up on Facebook in recent months.

These fake accounts usually appear to be real at first glance-one might have mutual friends or their wall may be pretty filled out. Upon further inspection, however, these accounts usually boast outrageous material like profanity, revealing photos, or nonsensical rambling. They’ve been known to broadcast everything from harmless inside jokes to inappropriate pictures and cyber-bullying.

“Cassidy Butler” started adding hundreds of Garfield students in late 2009. She claimed to be a Garfield transfer student from Houston who just wanted to make some friends before moving to Seattle. Although many initially added her with no qualms and wrote friendly welcomes on her wall, people soon started to question the authenticity of her profile. The questioning quickly moved from “Are you a real person?” to “Who the f*** are you?” The select few who played along with Cassidy’s sexual jokes and commented on her photos had fingers pointed at them as the face behind this obviously fake account.

Garfield sophomore Toni McFall continued talking to Cassidy online for a few weeks “to get answers” and was later falsely accused of creating the account.

“People who I didn’t even know hit me up of Facebook calling me a lying bitch and asking me why I did it,” says McFall, who promptly blocked, deleted, and reported Cassidy Butler as a fake account to the Facebook administration. Later, some of Cassidy’s real Facebook friends in Houston confessed to Toni that they had made the account just to have fun and mess with people.

Zach Ward, ’12, teamed up with his cousin Joseph Ward who lives in Boston. The pair made a fake account saying that Joseph Ward was a junior at Ingraham who just wanted to make some friends at Garfield.  Although it was only intended for fun, this false account triggered a huge response among  friends, both online to “Joseph” and in person to Zach Ward.

“To me, people just act really confused and want to know if he’s real or not,” says Zach Ward, “but online, no one has any boundaries because … they will probably never meet [Joseph].”  In both instances, Zach Ward felt embarrassed and ashamed. “It escalated to something way bigger than I expected,” Zach Ward says, “It was just a joke to me.”

The majority of the fake accounts are for fun and don’t target people in dangerous ways. Most of the cyber-bullying starts as backlash towards the creators once they’ve been figured out.

“What irritated me most is all the drama this brought,” McFall says. “I lost a lot of respect for people at Garfield who believed every rumor and brought so much attention to this dumb, fake account.”

The last question for the Cassidy Butler case is: why choose Garfield? “I guess everyone wants to be a Bulldog,” says McFall