Manti Madness

The story involving Manti Te'o, the college football player at Notre Dame who'd had a girlfriend he was connected to on Facebook but never met that died of cancer after enduring a car accident, took a weird turn when it turned out that  the girlfriend never existed.  Te'o kept pretending she was a real person once he found out out the truth until everyone else found out, presumably because he was too embarrassed to admit he had been duped.  There may be more to the story than that - Te'o himself has been accused of perpetrating the hoax - but I would have no trouble believing he was the victim of a hoax.  Assumed and fabricated identities are a coin of the realm in the social media age.  Anyone can be fooled into thinking someone is who one says one is. 

Case in point: You all know I'm connected to fashion models on Facebook.  One of my Facebook model friends encouraged me to connect with another model who was also supposed to be on Facebook, and so did a photographer I met through Facebook and met in person in the spring of 2012.  The model I was encouraged to connect with was a real person, all right, but the Facebook account wasn't; someone signed on to the social media network claiming to be her and using a picture from her portfolio as a profile photo . . . and no doubt using other pictures of her in Facebook albums.  It was an embarrassing moment for those involved, which is why I'm not naming names here. 

Oh yeah, here's something else: I've gotten e-mails from people claiming to be one of my Facebook friends (both Facebook friends I haven't met in person and those I have) who instead are spammers trying to sell me some useless product.  I know how they got my e-mail address, as I have it posted on my Family page (so fans of that band can contact me), and they must have easily found out who my Facebook friends are by seeing my Facebook page.  Oh yeah, another Facebook friend of mine got her account hacked and someone claiming to be her started flirting with me on the chat feature.

I don't want to single out one social media site, or the Internet, for that matter, as the source of such mischief making; scammers and spammers use cell phones as well.  Someone in southern New Jersey randomly sent a text message to my cell phone encouraging me to flirt with her online.  I don't know anyone in southern New Jersey.  The downside to connecting to new people through today's technology is that you end up getting connected to people you don't know and people you don't want to know.  Yes, as anyone who ever saw the Simone Signoret movie I Sent a Letter To My Love knows, fraudulent identity in communications is nothing new.  But the Internet has multiplied the opportunities for such deceptions exponentially.  And I Sent a Letter To My Love - a movie about a woman who starts a pen-pal relationship with a man she's never met and is surprised to find out who it is (spoiler alert for those who never saw it - it's a male relative, though  I won't say any more) is not a mean-spirited movie, while the Manti Te'o hoax is certainly a cruel joke.

I hope Manti Te'o recovers from this public humiliation, if indeed he had nothing to do with the hoax.  It's just one more example of how we all have to be careful online.  Computer viruses are easier to guard against than something like this.