Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
There are a lot of people who have grown sick of hearing about Manti Te’o and the hoax that he was involved in. Te’o finally spoke Friday night to ESPN to say that he had nothing to do with it and the man in charge of the hoax had apologized on Twitter to him. While that is all well and good, there is something that can’t stop being addressed and that is the cat fishing.
I’m surprised that more athletes haven’t had this happen to them in this day and age of no time to do much else besides your job and talking to people online all the time. What people don’t realize is that there are some actual decent people out there online and those people get the short end of the stick when creeps and weirdoes decide that they have to get their fun from messing with people on the internet. There is absolutely no reason for it and while there is no way that it is going to completely stop since all of them can’t be caught, I hope people realize that everyone that they are talking to online isn’t who they claim to be.
I know people want this story to go away and no one wants to hear about Te’o anymore for the time being but this is something that needs to be addressed even more than just put on the back burner. As a society, we owe it to ourselves to not allow people to deceive us with a catfish scheme like this. I hope Te’o has learned his lesson about internet love because you know that there are going to be more people who try to pull this stunt again on him.
Andy Schmidt is a columnist/writer for RantSports. Follow him on Twitter @ASchmidtSports or like his Facebook page.
