RinHaru Catfishing Scandal

Event
Event:	RinHaru catfishing and/or sockpuppeting controversy, RinHaru catfishing wank, Free! catfishing wank
Participants:
Date(s):	May 30, 2016 - June 2, 2016
Type:	Imbroglio
Fandom:	Free!
URL:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The RinHaru Catfishing(/Sockpuppeting) Scandal occurred within the Free! fandom in 2016, and involved a notable RinHaru shipper catfishing other fans by stealing another Twitter user's selfies, as well as sockpuppeting between three moderately active accounts. It is considered a significant event within the MakoHaru vs RinHaru ship war.

The event took place largely on Twitter and the swimming-anime community on Dreamwidth, the Free! anon meme. Because the catfishing was exposed first, it is nominally more tied to the event than the term "sockpuppeting."

History

On May 30, 2016, a Twitter account by the name of fishreceipts was created, appearing to have the sole purpose of exposing the catfisher in question. Its first tweet, of two total, was a mention to user @wormkink, informing them that another user, ana @kozummes, had been stealing their selfies for an entire year. Some of the selfies were from 2012, four years prior to the scandal.

The user had been considered a BNF among RinHaru shippers, so fans started vaguely posting about it. The topic first made its way to swimming-anime on May 31, 2016, referencing these vague posts.

Shortly after the first comment, user luffay on Twitter (now saltkath), posted a detailed summary of the situation:

ok so i realize non-rh ppl follow me and might be confused so here's a (long) explanation for the past few hours

[Screencap of a text document]

basically a mutual my rin/haru twitter friends all knew and loved turned out to be using another girl's selfies to catfish the entire TL. we later realized they had actually cycled through three different accounts in the past three years, pretending to be different people. we put it together after the latest abandoned account was outed and realized the writing style and quirks were really similar between it and the previous one, along with some other past suspicious incidents and coincidences (lmao hindsight is 20/20). they're now at a different account under a different name and is denying it but lmao we Know

so yeah basically the entire rh tlist was in a shitstorm the past few hours. a lot of us were good friends with the fake - hell, most of us met each other through them - and this has come as a huge shock. by now most of it has worn off and we've transitioned to joking about it but there were still some ppl who were particularly close to the fake who are really upset about all this. i was upset too since this person introduced me to a ton of my current fandom friends, but i'm mostly over it since I hadn't spoken to them in months and now I'm just angry on behalf of a few specific people who were really hurt by this, so yeah.

tl;dr some loser somewhere catfished like scores of ppl with three different accounts in order to talk to them about anime??? what was the payoff. who are you. what was the point.

The tweet spread across the fandom, and was both summarized and linked on swimming-anime. In addition to the catfishing, the connected sockpuppet accounts were revealed to be Ana (@kozummes), Effie (@matsuoking, another BNF), and Eva (@slytherize). Users noted their similar typing styles, grammatical quirks, and taste in Tumblr themes. One user also speculated that the catfisher may have known @wormkink, the user whose photos they stole, as they were both Brazilian fans who were in One Direction fandom, and that Ana/@kozummes had posted pictures of them that were not publicly online. Another user noted a pattern of Ana and Effie attempting to get mutual friends to say nice things about the other when one of them was conveniently "offline." Ana and Effie's accounts got quickly deleted on the same day after these accusations, and Eva's shortly thereafter.

According to an anonymous comment, users on Twitter who were familiar with one of these personas (notably Ana @kozummes) started posting "receipts" and talked about how they had already "hated her." This led to another anonymous user making a comment: "[RinHarus] keep proving what people said, they can't let drama go and keep making it a bigger issue/spreading it to even bigger parts of fandom/people who weren't involved". Anonymous comments then ranged from being sympathetic towards the people who had known the sockpuppeter/catfisher, to people noting that it looked so obvious now that it should have been obvious.

On June 1, 2016, Dreamwidth user kazuyas posted a logged-in comment on swimming-anime, expressing outrage at the discussions on the meme:

Subject: y'all are cute

i find it hilarious that people think it's more entertaining to make fun of the people that were duped than the lame-ass fake who felt the need to create THREE separate identities and steal some girl's photos just to feel relevant. like way to miss the easy target. we've been making your jokes for you because it turns out the person you considered our "ringleader," the one you thought "brainwashed" all of us—turns out she was in fact the biggest fake!!

the person who brought us the "rinharu are fake friends" drama from the wank meme, who turned it into a goddamn meme for us, turned out to be the fakest friend of us all!!

(but, hey, at least you can say she never made rape jokes.)

this bitch actually composed conversations WITH HERSELF between the effie and ana and the ana and eva identities. we also found out one of the fics she wrote was plagiarzied from a GODDAMN LOUIS/HARRY FIC FROM 2014.

you can't make this shit up. it's been a wild ride unearthing all of this and i've spent more time laughing about it than wangsting over it.

we're laughing because it's the only way to fucking cope with this shit. i don't blame you for finding this ridiculous because i think it's pretty ridiculous too. i'll also be upfront and say, yeah, ana (the second persona) was a fucking bitch to some people, some people i'm close to, and those folks were considerate enough to not drag it all out into the open if only to keep from starting drama.

can't say the same for you assholes.

it's becoming clear that effie/ana/eva was rude as hell to more than a few people. we're all coming around to that, i think, even though it fucking hurts because this is someone a lot of us considered a friend. but we'll get the fuck over it because we're capable functional human beings and because even if the person who brought us together was a fake hoe, the friendships we've made are not.

so to somehow point at us and determine that this is karma for being friends with someone who we thought was genuine and loved the same things we did—are you really telling me that we don't deserve to feel betrayed just because you have a stick up your ass and think she's a wanker? thanks for confirming what we already knew—that you're soulless hacks!!

what's even funnier is that this shit is tame from an outsider's perspective, so that you get your sick kicks from it is pretty pathetic.

i feel sorry for you, looking in on the outside trying to drag us. we've been dragging effie and ana and eva—hell, even ourselves—for the past day. there are jokes and stories and receipts that y'all will never have context for, so can you really even drag us at all??

and in truth the most valuable part of this was that it brought all of us wanky rhs back together for the first time in awhile (a terrible nightmare for some of you, i'm certain).

so you think this is drama that's ripping us apart? you think this is karma? nah, bitch, it's only made us stronger. mhs can't touch what we've been through.

so that you spend your time getting off to this shit, to a girl stealing someone else's photos, plagiarzing fucking larry fic, and trying to say that we deserve it because we were friends with a wanker all along, all behind anonymous accounts—that says more about you lowlifes than it ever could about us.

Many anonymous users were amused by the comment:

it's not them being upset that is OTT this is actually understandable, it's just the way they keep making a even bigger buzz of it and then trying to act all tough and strong i.e. ''mh's cant touch what we've been through'' like for real?? lol yes please tell me about how your whole family had to starve or your dog got kidnapped. that's what we're laughing about when we say they're ott. it's one thing to be upset, another one is writing down this level of embarrassing essay just to show oh-how-above-it-all they are, they just sound like try-hards trying to mask how upset they are deep down. if you are that upset and hurt ok fine just go and mourn or complain about it privately and then let it die, the way they keep being ott about it and then trying to clap back at the people who laugh is what KEEPS making people laugh.

I posted de-anon to what I thought was the equivalent of a mic drop, but in reality came across as an angry prepubescent child using all the "bad words" I know. mhs can't touch that.

At some point, Ana/Effie/Eva may have also posted to the anon meme on June 1, 2016, pretending to be one of Effie's followers. Though this was never confirmed, the comment got a deluge of accusations from other anonymous users identifying them as such.

After a comment that was deemed over the line by the mod, the thread was frozen. Discussion of the scandal quickly disappeared from the meme.

Impact

The scandal took place in the middle of a four year gap between Free!'s second season, Free! - Eternal Summer (2014), which was intended to be its final season, and its third season, Free! Dive to the Future (2018). The fandom was not considered very active then; most users had moved onto other sports anime, notably Haikyuu, which was airing at the time and was also discussed at one point during the scandal, involving shipping wank.

Despite the BNF status of Effie and Ana, after the threads got frozen on swimming-anime, the public discussion on Twitter soon died down. Tweets and accounts during that time period may also be deleted; not many other reactions during the time can be accessed in 2024. @wormkink, upon being told that their selfies were used by a catfisher, seemed deeply disturbed by this news, but appeared to be active on Twitter for several years afterward.

Regardless, it is still memorable to this day.