A Breakdown of the Wild Catfishing Allegations Made Against a Lakers Podcast Host

"On Monday night, NBA Twitter was engulfed in a bizarre mystery featuring a Lakers podcast host that went missing which led to some wild catfishing allegations. The story is complex and has several twists and turns but I’ll try my best to give a quick breakdown of the entire situation."

Rachel Nichols shouts out 'Vivian from Lakers Twitter" on the Jump pic.twitter.com/RioDtrC8zq

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) April 20, 2021

Game 7 of the Finals, Lakers vs Nets. If KD’s at the line shooting two free throws and all of Staples Center is chanting “Vivian”, there’s no way he’s not going at least 1-2 https://t.co/KpMtjTccFW

— Ali B (@ali_behpoornia) April 20, 2021

Academic says he discovered someone was submitting his work as their own, and also dressing and wearing the same tattoos to impersonate him

From a much longer thread by a historian of tattooing:

Did I ever tell you all about my academic stalker? Not a romantic story, but a catfish nonetheless. I'm an academic. The short version of a much longer story is that three or four years ago, I was catfished by a graduate student in another country,

— dr matt lodder (@mattlodder) January 15, 2021

who (amongst other things) used a variety of fake identities to get me to send him unpublished research, which he then submitted as his own for his degree, and presented at conferences. I have a video of him dressed as me, reading out a book chapter I wrote at a conference.

— dr matt lodder (@mattlodder) January 15, 2021

His hand. My hand. pic.twitter.com/uVfDTH6xrS

— dr matt lodder (@mattlodder) January 15, 2021

FYI:

Hi, new followers. I have very few other stories as good as that one. Sorry.

— dr matt lodder (@mattlodder) January 16, 2021

Bizarre story about a neuroscientist who allegedly has been running "a catfishing scam for years"

Gizmodo:

A bizarre saga of events played out on social media over the weekend, embroiling much of the close-knit world of scientists, academics, and researchers on Twitter. It started with accusations that Arizona State University’s actions had exposed one of their faculty members, an Indigenous woman and anthropologist, to an ultimately fatal case of covid-19. But it ended with allegations that the death was a hoax, carried out by someone who also faked the supposed professor’s entire existence.

...

many members of the science Twitter community now suspect that the academic who was the first to report the woman’s death...has pulled off a catfishing scam for years

Buzzfeed describes a Zoom memorial that was held following the apparently imaginary professor's "death."

Related, here's the story of a similar hoax:

To #epitwitter reeling from the @Sciencing_Bi
hoax. (Hoax: person pretended to die from COVID due to being forced to in-person teaching). My book (creative commons copy available: https://t.co/7GlSlpKIDd) has very similar example from the Arab Spring: Tom MacMaster's cruel hoax. pic.twitter.com/Qu9A4ZFRUv

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 3, 2020

"NATO group catfished soldiers to prove a point about privacy"

From February: "By the end of the exercise, the researchers identified 150 soldiers, found the locations of several battalions, tracked troop movements, and compelled service members to engage in 'undesirable behavior,' including leaving their positions against orders."

Related, I just finished Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. Terrific, and currently $3.99 at Amazon.

"Drew Cloud Is a Well-Known Expert on Student Loans. One Problem: He’s Not Real"

Chronicle:

has been quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNBC, and is a fixture in the smaller, specialized blogosphere of student debt

...

After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake.

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Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn’t respond to additional inquiries.

How conservative activists catfished Twitter employees

KH:

I was able to unearth some of the group’s methods of deception: It sent targets messages on LinkedIn and dating apps, built false identities on social networks, and operated a fake start-up out of a WeWork blocks from Twitter’s headquarters.

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The Twitter targets, who had been secretly recorded at parties, in bars, on first dates, and during job interviews, only found out about the deception on January 11, when the first Project Veritas video, titled “UNDERCOVER VIDEO: Twitter Engineers To ‘Ban a Way of Talking’ Through ‘Shadow Banning,’ Algorithms to Censor Opposing Political Opinions” went live.

...

After a brief phone conversation, Dale said he seemed like a great candidate and set up in-person interviews with her colleague and an investor in the company. Those went well and for four months last year, Norai thought he had a new job. He was in regular communication with his new colleagues, meeting up with them for dinner, drinks, and a baseball game, but they kept pushing his start date back, saying they were securing office space and finalizing funding.

...

Many of the male employees were secretly recorded while on dates at dimly-lit restaurants, sipping wine. Based on the number of times he appears in the videos in different locations and dress, one security engineer, Clay Haynes, appears to have been enamored enough with the operative pumping him for information to go out with her at least three times.

"Retired NBA star Ray Allen said he is a victim of 'catfishing,' and has asked a court to throw out a case where he is accused of stalking someone he met online"

ESPN:

"Coleman pretended to be a number of attractive women interested in Ray Allen," read the motion filed on Allen's behalf. "Ray believed he was speaking with these women and communicated with them."

...

In the filing, Allen said Coleman threatened to reveal details of their conversations, and that the sides eventually struck a deal to keep everything private. Allen said that deal has been violated and that Coleman has continued to harass him and his family through several social-media accounts.

"He posted about Ray's wife, Ray's children, Ray's dog, Ray's homes, Ray's wife's restaurant, and numerous other personal items," read the motion. "Coleman not only posted about these things, he would actually post while physically located inside Ray's wife's restaurant in Orlando. And he would make sure they knew it, tagging Ray and his wife on those posts."

"Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women"

DS:

For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.

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began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.

...

Over time, Ryan formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey. Some women told me that he would get drunk and berate them; others told me they felt emotionally abused and manipulated because he would imply that he’d hurt himself if they didn’t continue to talk to him. Ryan received nudes from at least two women I spoke with, one of whom said she did it because she was afraid he would hurt himself if she didn’t.

...

Ryan went on a podcast with RO in February of this year, a bold move for someone faking their entire identity. On the episode, Ryan’s voice is higher in tone, but again, no one thought too much of it.

"Fake War Photographer Gets Exposed After Fooling the World"

PP:

Right now, a conflict photographer named Eduardo Martins is supposedly driving around in a van somewhere in the Australian outback. And you probably won’t see any new work from him anytime soon: he’s in hiding after pulling off one of the craziest cons in the history of photojournalism.

...

His presence on Instagram not only gave him a massive fan base of over 120,000 followers, but it led to his work being published around the world. From smaller publications such as SouthFront to prestigious publications like the The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and The Telegraph, articles were illustrated with what everyone thought was Martins’ own work.

...

The Brazilian edition of VICE soon followed suit with an extensive photo essay titled “On the front with the Peshmerga.”

SXSW Tinder users are getting trolled by viral marketing for Ex Machina

Adweek.

Link roundup

1.  "Management 360 fell victim to the online hoax known as catfishing when an intern-turned-mailroom trainee hired in April was discovered to have created more than a dozen fictitious e-mail accounts that she utilized to make herself appear to be a well-connected industry insider."

2.  Larry Ellison's America's Cup team caught cheating, hit with "unprecedented penalties."

3.  Dana Scully was named for Vin Scully.

4.  The Awl:

the reason most people gravitate toward history and other non-fiction as they grow older is that they already know how life is going to play out, and they have no interest in seeing how a bunch of kids who dropped a large chunk of change to make connections in Iowa are going to manipulate an assembly of precious archetypes into articulating profundities which are neither new nor particularly incisive, although they may feel like both depending on how well camouflaged they are with up-to-the-moment references to brands and products.

Link roundup

1.  The thrilling conclusion to an Illusionist in Skyrim:

When I wake up, everything's normal for about a second - just long enough for me to read that "As a fully developed vampire, you are hated and feared." Then the entire Imperial Legion turns on me. Ah. This is going to be a problem.

2. Also very entertaining, how "Colts Punter Pat McAfee Nearly Got Catfished, Too, But Realized He Wasn't Famous Enough For Groupies."

3.  "There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written."  (Bowhead whales can live longer than 200 years.)

"Is [ESPN columnist] Sarah Phillips for real?"

Deadspin:

Is [ESPN columnist] Sarah Phillips for real? Thirteen months ago, she was an unknown message-board participant at Covers.com, a gambling website. Then Covers plucked her from the boards and gave her a weekly column, sight unseen. Five months after that, she was tapped by Lynn Hoppes, an editor for ESPN.com, to write a weekly column for ESPN's Page 2—once the home of writers like David Halberstam, Ralph Wiley, and Hunter S. Thompson, and which has now been rebranded as ESPN's Playbook. The swiftness of her ascent gave her that weird sort of internet half-celebrity whereby she became moderately famous before anyone really knew who she was.

Or before anyone was sure that she existed at all.