RTÉ SPORTS BROADCASTER Peter Collins says he has lodged a garda complaint over a number of Twitter accounts that impersonated him on the social network last week.
Controversy arose on Tuesday evening when a tweet purporting to be from Collins make a reference to the travelling community in relation to a discussion on TV3′s Tonight with Vincent Browne. That person later deleted the message and posted an apology.
Speaking on the Marion Finucane programme this morning, Collins said he believes that one person set up that account and that they then went on to create three or four other accounts claiming to be the ‘real’ Peter Collins.
“All Hell broke loose” after the initial inflammatory tweet was posted on Tuesday, he said.
Collins added that he has no idea who it is but that there are ways of finding out. He said Twitter could trace an account to a particular location and that he had lodged a garda complaint over the issue.
The garda computer fraud squad are responsible for investigating such complaints and the unit has contact with Twitter and Facebook to probe suspected fraudulent accounts.
“It’s not at all funny,” Collins told Finucane. “I reported it to the guards at a very early stage.”
He said that DIT media lecturer Harry Browne had made a good point in his newspaper column this week in saying that someone like Collins is the ideal person to impersonate online because he is neither high profile nor low profile.
The earlier tweets to come from the first fake account (which was active since August) related to football and Collins said the innocuous comments might have been made by any sports pundit, lending them the air of legitimacy.
RTÉ has confirmed to TheJournal.ie earlier this week that Collins does not have a Twitter account.
