Fake NFL player catfishing women online blows his own cover
Fake it ’til you make it. Or, in Ricardo “Maserati Rick” Agnant’s case, fake it ’til your sexist online comments eventually expose you as a fraud.
Agnant had reportedly been faking it for years — three years, to be exact. Combining his six-foot, 300 pound frame with some social media savvy, he spent years conning people into believing he was a professional football player.
He used his alleged NFL status to score dates with women and free meals in restaurants, but after he recently shared some controversial comments on Facebook, the jig appeared to be up.
According to a Black Sports Online investigation, Agnant’s web of lies began to untangle with a Facebook post from Washington Redskins linebacker Lynden Trail. Polling his followers, Trail asked why wealthy black athletes tend to marry white women. A fairly unknown user claiming to be a Miami Dolphin then chimed in on the thread.
African American women “don’t have proper guidance to how they should treat a man, so they mess up a lot in relationships,” said Maserati Rick, who added, “[Y]oung black athletes are looking for a woman to submit do they part, and they handle business. Men needs peace of mind, and you don’t get that with black women.”
Maserati Rick’s comments, as you’d expect, were not received very well, and with the mounting attention came the inadvertent scrutiny. Before long, as the New York Post noted, the professional football player who appeared to be nameless was revealed to be nothing more than a poser.
Using an array of Instagram filters, Agnant had been manipulating photos and successfully deceiving the internet since 2014 – the same year he managed to sneak into Dolphin’s training facility and compete in the NFL regional combine. He even claimed to have set a new NFL record for the 20-yard shuttle run.
“I signed a contract with The Miami Dolphins today,” he wrote in one Instagram post, which, in a common theme, featured an image where you can’t quite make out the face. The Dolphins, in a statement shared with Black Sports Online, confirmed Agnant had never signed a contract with Miami.
Agnant even managed to con a luxury car dealership into letting him test drive a few of its expensive vehicles. But when Agnant was eventually outed as a fraud, Maserati Rick disappeared from the internet. Agnant had scrubbed his social media presence clean, deleting both his Facebook and Instagram accounts.