Game, set and match: Irish social media gets pranked

Two Dublin City University students recently pranked all of Ireland by photoshopping a fake Instagram conversation with Roger Federer.

Two local Dublin residents Jamie Duff and Ollie White managed to fool thousands of Irish Instagram users by announcing they would each be playing tennis legend Roger Federer in a tennis match post-COVID.

The 20-year-olds posted video clips of their tennis skills on Instagram for all to see, tagging Roger Federer in order to attract attention.

“Then Jamie suggested, why don’t we make up a fake reply [from Federer] in order to prank 2,000 of our combined followers,” said White, who is originally from County Sligo.

So, with a bit of Photoshop magic, the pair put together a convincing edit that made it look like the real and verified Roger Federer account on Instagram responded to their video.

Having posted the fake response on their Instagram stories that night, the pair’s message box blew up and thousands of people began to text them regarding the matter. Little did they know this was only the beginning of something massive. 

The following day, White did some digging and uncovered a comedian who could do a voice impression of the Swiss tennis player.

Josh Berry was more than happy to take part and sent a convincing voice message to the lads to aide them in their prank. 

Their prank was going to plan, and their level of attention was only beginning to pick up. With thousands of messages and likes via popular media streaming sites like Tiktok, the pair began to realise they had the world eating from the pam of their hand. 

Mainstream media began to pick up on the news and the Dublin City University students were invited and discussed on multiple platforms such as Spin 1038, Today FM, 98FM, LovinDublin, Ocean FM and Dublin Live. Popular sports social media account SPORTbible also tweeted about the news to their 1.4 million followers.

“When it first started to take off, we were advised whether to go ahead with it or not. We didn’t want to step on anyone toes or damage anyone’s reputation with our prank,” White said.

“After talking to my dad about it, we came the conclusion that nobody was getting hurt and it was a totally light-hearted joke”

White on continuing on with the prank

“It ended up being totally fine, nobody got annoyed at us and it didn’t damage our reputation,” White said.

The news came out that the whole thing was a fix-up when the pair posted it onto their YouTube channel announcing the scandal.

“When we first uploaded the YouTube video, we expected it blow up more. We would love to pull more pranks but doing it in the public eye won’t be as easy,” said White.

“We’re not going to force ideas, if a good idea comes to us we will try execute it and make a video out of it.”