Trick or tweet: the boy who hoaxed the football world
Sam Gardiner is a football-mad schoolboy, but no one took his opinions seriously. So he created a fake Twitter personality and soon was talking tactics with Premiership players.
He tweets, he scores: ‘I wanted to prove a point,’ says Sam Gardiner.
For five minutes, Sam Gardiner panicked. He had been rumbled: he wasn't Dominic Jones. He hadn't spent years as a football scout, going to games most nights, searching for that one-in-a-million prospect, getting home at 3am, as he once claimed in an article he had written. He wasn't now a reporter for Goal, the international football magazine. He didn't look anything like the picture that was his Twitter identity.
But then Gardiner calmed down. He did a web search to check his legal position, which indicated that he hadn't committed fraud, because he had invented a new persona, not stolen someone else's. He went back on Twitter and with a few keystrokes created Samuel Rhodes, a freelance journalist for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. He trawled Google images for a byline photograph and on page 11 he found a clean-cut, blond chap with a resemblance to the Australian actor Simon Baker. His Twitter profile was back up instantly and scarcely any of his 3,000 followers even noticed.
This therefore shows, that on twitter you can trust twitter accounts especially if they claim they're very important and trust worthy. As these types of people tend to mock and fraud people like this boy did. And because he had loads of followers such as thousands, this encourages people to believe that they're realistic and perhaps because of there opinions on there tweets, it motivates an international audience to
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