There was a period in my life when I watched a lot of Catfish. Signed off work, I’d lie on the sofa mid-afternoon and watch people lie from their sofas in the American midwest. It’s an MTV reality show following the trails of suspicious lovers. Someone calls the presenter, Nev, and says: “The girl I’m in love with, maybe she doesn’t exist.” Nev performs some science on their text messages, does a Google image search, drives a while and ends up in a dusty suburb crippled by the closure of an abattoir, on the doorstep of a hoaxer, a teenage boy half delighted finally to be noticed.

There have been five series, each with up to 20 episodes, with another series premiering this week. So that’s 100 hearts broken online right there, with 20 more about to air; 100 people who have fallen in love with strangers they’ve only spoken to in emojis, who would totally visit but have a disorder that makes them melt in daylight, who have broken webcams, or Nokia 3210s, or another perfectly valid reason for not being real. It’s not just on TV. It’s happening across the world, every day, right now.

Anna Rowe, a teaching assistant from Canterbury, fell in love with a man on Tinder who (she discovered after meeting him) had used a picture of the Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan and was actually married with kids in London. Last week she called for the government to force people to use their real names on dating websites. “I am a victim of a catfish approach,” she said. “Using a fake profile and online identity as a platform to lure women or men for sex should be illegal, but it’s not.” We believe, she said, we’re “beginning a real relationship with the hope of a future together. Having sex is part of that believed relationship.” Isn’t it a shame how reality so often spoils the pleasure of reality shows?

In the past, when I’ve heard about friends of friends being duped on OKCupid, I’ve listened rapt as a cat watching moths. These stories are fascinating, the intersection of fear and romance, the horror of giving in to love. Four years ago I heard about Claire, who’d met a 35-year-old teacher called Seb online. We reported on her story, printing a picture of a photo of a bottle of perfume Seb had sent her, a gift. In the bottle’s reflection Claire didn’t see the tall bearded man she’d fallen in love with. Instead, she saw a woman. I’ve thought about Claire often since, hers being a tale with just enough shiver to sustain a thrill, and in that odd way that London works, our gravelled paths crossed again. My friend became her colleague; I asked her how she was; she emailed.

Since Claire was hoaxed, “catfishing” , the term originating from Nev Schulman’s original documentary, after a story about live cod needing a catfish in their tank when being exported, to keep them alert and swimming,has become embedded in popular culture. It’s become a verb. “But by giving catfishing the airtime,” Claire says today, “it’s had space to spread, like some sort of virus.” When she learned the truth about “Seb”, Claire found and befriended all the other women she had duped. As well as the “indelible mark of paranoia”, none of them has been able to meet a man who makes them feel like Seb did. “To switch off our unrealistic expectation of the ideal man is really tough,” Claire says, “because no one will ever match up to someone invented specifically to make you fall in love with them.”

Whether or not the government listens to Anna Rowe and makes catfishing illegal, whether or not catfishing burrows deep enough into our culture that every interaction is backlit with the possibility of hoaxery, it will go on and on. More people will discover a photo of their girlfriend in a Lands’ End catalogue from 1996, more people will hear a baby in the background, or wait for just another 15 minutes at Glasgow Central, their best shoes chafing.

Catfishers dupe their victims for thousands of reasons – the victims are taken in for only one. Because, even when the sad stories stack up like old New Yorkers, proving the search brings pain, we want to believe in love. We want to believe we will be seen, that someone will find our crooked teeth adorable, believe in the opportunity to be sincere with someone, for a second. That will never change. Catfishing, the phenomenon that’s now in its sixth season, is a cruel scam, one that breaks into a heart rather than a bank account, cruel because it takes so much longer to mend.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman