Gardaí are warning about the dangers of catfishing, following the recent popularity of the Two Johnnies’ “GAA Catfish” story.
The deceptive online activity sees someone creates a fake online persona to trick others, usually for personal gain or emotional manipulation.
The Catfish will typically use stolen photos and false information to construct a believable profile.
Sgt. John Duffy noted that as technology develops, false accounts are becoming increasingly more difficult to identify.
He told KCLR News; “With the advent particularly of artificial intelligence this is becoming easier and easier and even photographs and videos of people are now appearing where you can seem to talk to a video and it will answer the question as if it’s a video call with you, at the moment artificial intelligence has it so that the response time from a fake video is about a second and a half which is incredible really, but it is expected that by the end of this year that that will be down to about half a second”.
