Amy Jones was the victim of a catfishing
scandal after a fictitious American musician, Spooping Ray entered her life.
By
Casey Baughan
Amy Jones, “20-something” was creating her online
music blog, ‘hookedonthemusic’ when she fell center of a catfishing scandal
without any awareness. Little to her knowledge, she “hadn’t experienced
anything like this” and she didn’t even know what catfishing was “until I saw
the MTV show.” The American reality series MTV Catfish aired in 2012, proving
very popular across the globe.
Here at theEnd we will take you back to
when Amy received the message from ‘Spooping’. As a curious blogger wanting “to
know about more new music” this was a breath of fresh air for Amy, someone to
write about. They followed each other, exchanging regular messages as close companions
and “got to know her a lot”, says Amy. Supposedly Spooping was a requested
female American musician and had befriended British Amy to the point whereby
they both wanted to meet one another after their online friendship. “She had a
fan site and everything with different ‘tour dates’ and stuff on it – thinking about it now I was so naïve but
got sucked into the idea that she was a real singer”, says Amy.
Three years of poor excuses and copious
attempts to avoid Skype calls, alarm bells were ringing for Amy with no real
sight of ‘Spooping’ via social media or through message. “I decided to use
tactics from the MTV show and Google image search her pictures as I was curious
as to whether the character they had created was actually a real person.” The
excuses for not calling/Skyping stretched as far as “that it wasn’t part of her
contract”, alongside the usual busy lies and tour commitments. Most catfish stories
begin with confusion and false hope but Amy took a stand. She started digging
for information, finding similar YouTube videos and a verified Instagram of a Brazilian
singer, Lu Alone – “that’s when I knew
that I had been duped, as she wasn’t the person that I was talking to.”
Spooping even went to the extreme effort of
creating a music video on YouTube to keep their friendship with Amy “which was
a complete rip-off of Lu Alone’s but was really convincing, so I believed it”,
describes Amy. The web of lies had gotten too much to handle and “did seem to spiral out of control and had
gotten deep.”
After the time-consuming three yearlong
scandalous catfishing situation, it still remains sore for the UK music blogger,
who now thrives successfully in her work. “I feel sad that I believed it, I
feel betrayed and lied to. I do get
emotional about it because I told them pretty personal stuff.” Eventually when
the time came to confront the ‘fraud’ much to everyone’s shock, they had deleted
all of their social media accounts without a trace of the truth, leaving the
mystery unresolved as to who Spooping truly is.
“I felt that I could trust them and to be let down was a real shock to
me, I feel that I can’t fully trust anyone anymore.” Now the only thing that remains of Spooping, is their fan blog.
Lu Alone
Credit: Caroline Knowles, Fotoblog, Accessed 28/03/18
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