In this 21st century when the entire world is exposed to the huge cosmos of the internet, many people take the opportunity to fulfill their own needs, create fake profiles on social media to impersonate someone else, and fool people.
Recently, a woman in Singapore has come across the Instagram profile of famous Singapore actor Desmond Tan—who starts in new Taiwanese drama, "Falling Into You." But the only problem was that the Instagram profile was fake and the person who was operating the social media handle was not the actor, but an impersonator. When the woman realized that the Instagram account was fake, she exposed the man who claimed to be the Singaporean actor.
The Revelation
The unnamed woman claimed that she was targeted by two fake profiles on Instagram and decided to respond to one of them. According to the screenshots of the conversation which the woman had with the impersonator, the man sent photos of the real actor.
The woman said the man also video-called her, using old video clips from Tan's original Instagram "but would end the call before the video ends." The screenshot of the conversation between the man and the victim were flirty. When the woman asked why he was using a different profile instead of his official account, the man told her that it was a personal account to know some of his fans better.
"It's a new account dear...More like a personal one where I can avoid all the stress and attention," the impersonator told the woman during the Instagram chat. When she asked why he reached out to her, the man then wrote, "Your profile attracted me honestly."
Soon they moved the conversation from Instagram to WhatsApp but the woman noticed that the phone number is not a Singapore cell phone number, rather, it had a U.S. country code in front of it (+1).
After noticing the phone number, when the woman asked him why was using the U.S. number, the man told her, "That is my international number, decided to chat here, don't want to receive too many calls."
The woman told Stomp that she tried to test his Chinese language as "I wanted to stress him to use Google Translate all the time when he conversed with me," and as a result, it turned out that his Chinese was completely translated version.
"He could not even Google what dialect (it) is and beat around the bush by asking me what my dialect is," she said and added, "If it was Desmond, who is a Singaporean, he would surely know what it is."
The Play Ends Here
After a while the woman decided to end the conversation and told the man, "I have decided...don't think I want to talk to you anymore...good luck in your catfishing." The woman told Stomp, "I wish I had more time to play more and expose his catfishing methods but did not have time to entertain him for him to ask me for money."
She wanted to share this experience to raise awareness on catfishing on social media as such impersonators can approach as businessmen, actors, pilots, and traders. "All sorts to fulfill the needs of different targeted women," she said.
However, in reality, the Singaporean actor Tan was busy working on the Taiwanese drama series, "Falling Into You". As per recent reports, Tan, who stayed in Taipei for the shooting of the series, said he quite missed the city after spending a long time there.
