How Tegan and Sara Were Driven Mad by a Wild Catfishing Scheme

Online interactions are based on confidence, because there are few final means of certifying the identity of the person with whom we communicate. Naturally, this situation can lead to deception and manipulation, as it has done – to torment the effect – for Tegan and Sara, the popular indie rock duo whose life was turned upside down by a mysterious actor of bad faith which, for more than a decade, came with tegan with fans, friends and business partners.

Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishing is an investigation into the myriad of means by which the Internet can be exercised for harmful purposes. More than that, however, it is an anatomy of a complicated crime and wreckage caused by it, not only for famous artists but also for innocent admirers who were led to believe that fiction was reality.

In Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishingTegan admits that this type of accessibility was very important to her and helped the group develop, so it was a big shock when, in 2011, she and her management team (led by Piers Henwood and Kim Persley) learned that there was a false Tegan, that they nicknamed Fegan, who had developed long -term relationships with various fans. In these press releases, Fegan has proven its legitimacy by revealing private information (for example, on the diagnosis of Tegan’s mother’s mother’s cancer) and by sharing personal photographs and unpublished demos.

Tegan and Company might have never heard of that without a fan named Julie who, having bounded by Fegan, received images from the Passports by Tegan and Sara, which struck her as a bad. When she contacted this to a friend affiliated with artists, he relayed that Tegan did not know her. Which, for Julie, meant that “Tegan has a big problem”.

What she did, and Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishing Consult how, in the aftermath of this bomb, additional fans came forward, admitting that they thought they had been talking with Tegan for years by email and SMS.

Unsurprisingly, Tegan was not too satisfied with this situation, especially since the evidence indicated that the attacker was in possession of confidential documents, recordings and other documents. She and everyone initially supposed that the culprit could be someone in his inner circle, thus attaching the paranoia and the suspicions that inevitably made her feel that she had opened the figurative door too wide for fans.

There are two questions at the heart of Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishingAnd neither is easy to answer. The first is who was fans and knowledge of Tegan de Tegan, including a woman named JT who had met Tegan for years earlier in the music scene of Vancouver and who was led to believe that she was in an online sex with the artist.

Despite many letters of ceasefies and dedication and the use of cybersecurity and detective specialists, Tegan discovered that it was extremely difficult to find the fraudsters online, especially when they are as accomplished as Fegan, who pretended to be Tegan as well as fans like fans, and perhaps even their lawyers. In fact, it was not (and is still not) clear if there were several fegans operating at the same time, alone or in collaboration, to pull the wool on everyone’s eyes.

The greater problem raised by Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishing This is why someone would take the trouble to commit this crazy trick, since there was not much to gain in terms of money or proximity to the real Tegan. The social psychologist and expert in cyberterrorism Max Kilger offers a potential explanation, maintaining that such scams provide several things to cat fishermen: connection; the possibility of intimacy; the ability to act with confidence; And the psychological reward to have power and control over others, which can be addictive.

Admittedly, Fegan was obsessed with the pretension of being Tegan, and the intention of interfere with (if not the ruin) of his life, to go so far as to send a girlfriend then with wild accusations, and to spread as much disinformation as even the victims of this madness (like JT) did not completely believe in the statements of Tegan according to which she was not Fegan.

Fanatical: Tegan and Sara cat fishing strives to end on a final note, the director Carr and Tegan digging so deeply in the case that they finally proposed a legitimate potential suspect: a person called here “Tara” who asks that his identity remains anonymous. Tara’s conduct is strange and ladle to make it the center of their efforts, culminating with Carr’s trip to Maine to interview Tara, only so that the woman suddenly cancels in the last second. A subsequent telephone call between the director, Tara, and Tegan becomes quite tense, but frustrating for Tegan, it leaves him the impression that Tara is not Fegan – which means, of course, that the one who makes her crazy is still there.