Katie Byrne

And they claimed that it has nothing to do with some of the new rules that were brought in in the wake of the scandal at RT about things like declaration of gifts and things like that.

And they were insistent, no, we're just too busy to be doing this every day.

And we'd like to focus on our other ventures.

Yeah, so it all started in 2022.

They told this story at a live show that they had about essentially a woman who was allegedly catfishing people, pretending to be someone she wasn't and engaging in online relationships with a few different men.

And that one anecdote at the live show just exploded into a thing unto itself.

They got...

a deluge of responses from different people saying, I think that I've been catfished by the same person.

And that turned into a two-part podcast series that they did basically uncovering what this was, which was as many as 40 men being catfished by this one woman who was posing under different names.

She had taken photographs of real people, other women, and pretended to be them.

And it ranged from

some men who might have had brief interactions with her and never again to men who had quite long drawn out essentially online relationships with this woman while she was pretending to be someone that she wasn't.

And it just kind of took the country by storm, really.

It generated a huge amount of interest

The PSNI is investigating the high-profile GAA catfish scam while Gorthy have urged members of the public not to share images which contain misinformation, disinformation and fake news.

I think as well that GAA angle to it was part of what made it so interesting as well in that it was...

men in communities who were really well-known local GAA players and people who were involved in GAA clubs.

So people who are really big faces in towns and villages up and down the country.

It did extend across county boundaries to loads of different places as well.

There was a lot of people thinking, well, I know someone who's been affected by this or I know someone who knows someone.