The @derrico_henrio X account fooled a lot of people with a tweet on a non-existent Baylor scandal. The @derrico_henrio X account fooled a lot of people with a tweet on a non-existent Baylor scandal. (@derrico_henrio on X/Twitter.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

There have been many cases of fake social media posts fooling sports media personalities, athletes, and fans. Generally, though, the fake account in question has had a similar account name to an actual reporter, or has pretended to be a local reporter, and doesn’t have a very obvious “parody” in its bio (at least not until after the fake post starts to take off).

That’s not what happened with a X (formerly Twitter) post from @Derrico_Henrio, whose bio is “PARODY ACCOUNT – TCU Grad – Former Meteorologist – Pulitzer Prize Winner – Lawyer – Tax Fraud Enthusiast – Sports Nut – Actor – NOT AFFILIATED WITH CBS SPORTS,” but who changed a display name and image to look like CBS Sports’ college football account Friday and put out a post about a supposed sports betting scandal at Baylor (which did not happen):

That was quickly referenced as obvious satire by many, including CBS Sports’ Shehan Jeyarajah:

However, the post picked up a ton of views (more than one million as of 1 p.m. ET Saturday), and a lot of quote tweets taking it seriously from some prominent people. And many of those were still up more than 12 hours later with no follow-ups, including one from Jason Whitlock:

Here are a few of the many other comments taking this seriously:

This even sparked one particular threat to sue. That came from Sarah Kennedy Ellis, a vice president (global demand and growth marketing) at Google Cloud:

Ellis later somewhat walked that back:

At any rate, this does fall into a long history of people falling for fake social media posts. And it’s amusing that this one took off so much despite it being much more obviously fake, particularly with an account handle that’s nowhere near the account being impersonated.

Some of that may be because there have been some betting scandals with some similarities to what’s being reported here (although none yet with suggestions of this many athletes on one team involved in betting on their own games). And there are certainly going to be more gambling scandals. But, as always, verifying that information is real and not satire does matter.

[@derrico_henrio on X/Twitter]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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