Sam Gardiner is a football-mad schoolboy, but no one took his opinions seriously. So he created a fake Twitter personality and soon was talking tactics with Premiership players. Tim Lewis meets the spoofer extraordinaireFor five minutes, Sam Gardiner panicked. He had been rumbled: he wasn't Dominic Jones. He hadn't spent years as a football scout, going to games most nights, searching for that one-in-a-million prospect, getting home at 3am, as he once claimed in an article he had written. He wasn't now a reporter for Goal, the international football magazine. He didn't look anything like the picture that was his Twitter identity.But then Gardiner calmed down. He did a web search to check his legal position, which indicated that he hadn't committed fraud, because he had invented a new persona, not stolen someone else's. He went back on Twitter and with a few keystrokes created Samuel Rhodes, a freelance journalist for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. He trawled Google images for a byline photograph and on page 11 he found a clean-cut, blond chap with a resemblance to the Australian actor Simon Baker. His Twitter profile was back up instantly and scarcely any of his 3,000 followers even noticed.Gardiner, of course, is not Dominic Jones or Samuel Rhodes; the reality is both more interesting and more humdrum. Gardiner is a 17-year-old from High Barnet, north London. His dad runs a financial trading company and his mum has a business selling leather coats and sheepskin... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2014-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]