20 years ago no one would have figured out Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s girlfriend hoax. No one would have had the time to put in the effort of searching through tens of thousands of birth certificates to prove her records didn’t exist. And whether Manti Te’o was really taken in by an elaborate hoax or he was deliberately fabricating a story to boost his profile (his grandmother legitimately died; wouldn’t that have raised his profile?), we still don’t know the why for this. But we can tell you all about the how.
Welcome to the strange and dark art of Catfishing, where truth is what you write and you can create life with a couple dollars and a few clicks of the keyboard. Technically anyone with a fake Facebook profile is guilty of catfishing, but only a few people can claim themselves to be masters. When done properly, a web personality can be created with its own blog, Twitter, LinkedIn history, and Spotify tastes. Your fake personality will even strike Google as more ‘legitimate’ than many real people as it has more points of contact for Google’s penguin algorithm. And if you don’t have a lot of time, you can pay people to do virtually all of the background work. Consider, for instance:
- Imaginary Girlfriend: For just $45 a month, get piles of ‘evidence’ to document your love for the girl of your dreams — letters, text messages, emails, phone calls, and more. And after two months, you’ll get a heartwrenching letter begging you not to ‘break up’ with her (the site’s way of telling you to renew your subscription).
- Career Excuse: Have you ever wanted to create an imaginary career for your imaginary character? Career Excuse will provide you with resumé documentation, reference letters, and will even vouch for you if someone calls them.
- Ed Dante: Do you want improve on your writing? Ed and his cohorts can write all the blog entries, technical papers, and flights of fancy you claim to be responsible for. For a price, of course. Surprised? He’s written for hundreds of cheaters over the years and not one of them has been caught.
The worst part of this story for us is how easy catfishing is in the web 2.0 era. Remember Stephen Glass? Glass was a journalist for the New Republic who simply fabricated the “big software company” he was writing a story about. It was discovered that he had made up nearly every aspect of every news story he’d ever written, and was fired within a day. At the time, his fraud was unthinkable and considered the work of a twisted genius who got caught and would never bother the world again.
Well, it turns out that Glass was the father of an industry — an industry so large that it dwarfs a national scandal.