Everyone knows someone with an absolutely wild catfishing story, but Troye Sivan may just have upped the ante, taking to Twitter to share a story about the time he was duped online by someone claiming to be Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
In the video, Sivan says that a few months ago, his manager Dani reached out to him saying she’d had a phone call with Thunberg’s father in which he shared that the activist was a huge fan of Sivan’s music, and was working on a project called ‘Stars Save the Earth’.
“My immediate reaction was, okay, maybe that doesn’t translate into English right, because that sounds a little weird,” says Sivan in the video.
Sivan went on to give “Greta” his phone number and the pair begin texting – “Hey Greta, this is Troye Sivan, I just want to say I’m so inspired by your work. If there’s any way that I can be of any service, please let me know.”
Sivan later gets contacted from his manager, who explains that she spoke to her boyfriend, who is Swedish, about Thunberg’s “father’s” apparent poor English skills, and it all begins to unravel.
“They go on YouTube and they start searching for interviews of Greta Thunberg’s dad, and they listen to these interviews, and Dani’s just like, ‘That is not the voice that I heard on the phone today.'”
It then becomes clear that Sivan has been a catfishing victim, but he took it all in good stride, saying, “I died laughing. To me, this was the most hysterical thing.”
“The fact that my ego was big enough to be like, ‘Yeah, Greta Thunberg kind of wants to chill, she’s a big fan, she wants to save the planet together.’ It just completely mortified me and made me want to die and also cry laughing.”
Sivan goes on to recount seeing headlines a couple of weeks ago revealing that Prince Harry fell victim to the same hoax.
“Prince Harry got completely pranked by the same people. Turns out it’s these Russian hackers that did this elaborate scheme. They got Bernie Sanders, they got Prince Harry. They almost got me.”
Watch Sivan tell the whole story below.
https://twitter.com/troyesivan/status/1243381310111903744
