Poor Bertie, he has been subject to an online dating catfish hoax that was circulated over WhatsApp yesterday.
In the audio message, a woman is telling a story of a “supposed” tinder date catfish incident her friend had.
So here’s how the “story” goes:
Her friend had been chatting to a guy she had matched with on Tinder. They arranged to go on a date and when it came closer to the time, the guy came clean and said I’m not who I say I am. He explained that he is a well known public figure and he could not be seen on Tinder. The date went ahead and when this girl arrives on the date she was shocked to find her “date” was none other than the former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Now there’s a lot of things about this story that is hard to believe. What is even more unbelievable than her unlikely date is two people who matched on Tinder actually meeting in person. Now I know you’re all familiar with Tinder but for those of you who might be have been living under a rock the past 5 years here goes my best explanation:
Tinder is a well known global “sexting app” people scroll through photos, swipe right if they find some attractive or if you’re a man, swipe right to everyone and hope for the best. There’s an awkward exchange of chat and emojis that all start with a “hi”. People talk about meeting up but these plans never materialise. The “chat” fizzles out, one ghosts the other and usually 3 months down the line another “hi” crops up.
A spokesperson for Bertie has said that the recording is “complete rubbish” and the claims are “100% untrue”.
“It is unfair that anyone would be subjected to this in any walk of life either political or otherwise. Something should be done to protect people from this sort of thing,”
This week Facebook, the owners of WhatsApp, announced they would limit the number of times people could forward messages to crack down on suck fake news incidents.
WhatsApp’s 1.5bn users will be limited to forwarding message to five other recipients rather than twenty.
