MovieChat Forums > Untold (2021) Discussion > Catfished before catfishing was a thing

Catfished before catfishing was a thing

posted 2 years ago by Who (5146)
6 replies | jump to latest

Sad story. I didn’t know anything about this story but football fans probably remember it.

Catfishing has always been a thing. The internet from the beginning is a place where people could be anonymous, and hide behind a made up username and profile.

The show catfish successfully coined the term, featured these kind of stories, but it didn’t invent them.

I rolled my eyes at the part of the documentary when they said catfishing wasn’t part of the culture, it definitely was. There was always doubt that People online who they said they were. Manti was just naive, and he got fooled.

[–] Who (5146) 2 years ago

I meant the label “catfishing” was new, and the term itself raised awareness about this type of internet based romantic-targeted con. We can all roll our eyes at Manti’s naivite, but many people trusted texting and social media circles in the early days of smart phones, and were victimized by it in various ways. True, Manti wasn’t a worldly person just a young guy who grew up on an island in a sheltered family community with fundamental Mormon beliefs. It said a lot about him when he turned down his dream school USC because of some vague remark by a priest that he interpreted as a divine message from God.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

he went on to play in the nfl without any further controversy.

[–] Vicar358 (22) 2 years ago

His career was not the same though. It was an incredibly sad story.

[–] stickman38 (3017) 2 years ago

I'll have to agree with the previous poster. Catfishing was a thing starting way back in the early 2000's. People would often pretend to be someone else on the internet, even back in the 90s people were doing this. But when high speed internet came out it became much more common. It's possible that Te'o was not internet savvy, I would believe this more than him being just a nice guy that got fooled by a nice person as the documentary makes it seem like.

But to carry on with Roniah for what like... 3 years? Thats pretty bad and quite unfortunate. But in my opinion, Te'o didn't do anything wrong, he just got fooled. However, I think that Roniah bitch should do jail time for what he did.

I thought the law was pretty clear on this, you can't use any form of communication to deceive people.

In my opinion, the only thing Te'o did wrong was saying that "lannay" was his girlfriend when it's someone that he had never met in person. You just can't refer to someone as your girlfriend or boyfriend if you've never met them in person, that's just ridiculous.

Still, it's not a big deal, Te'o should get over it and move on, nobody cares about it anymore, you got fooled... big deal, it's over.

I've seen scams much worse than this, I saw one person on the Dr Phil show that sent over a million dollars to someone they thought was going to be their future lover. These love scams are pretty crazy. Apparently there's big money in it.. lol

[–] April-151-CT (10210) 2 years ago

No, Nev Schulman got him beat by about 2 years. Nev was catfished (supposedly) back in 2007, 2 years before Manti Te'o was. Nev's documentary about it is what led to the weekly show.