Dallas Realtor proves there’s a new kind of Catfish

Taking “catfishing” in a different direction, D Magazine in Dallas confronted her for misrepresenting the D Magazine logo, called her on it, and according to D Magazine, the conversation went like this:

• D Magazine: “I’m curious. How is it that you acquired these logos? I am the person who disseminates these to the winners, so I am unsure how it is you even have one.”
• Glesby: “Uh, you can just Google image it.”

Lesson No. 1: Just because you can take it from the Internet does not mean you should. The owner of the logo, photos, etc. will probably find you with a Google search and come after you.

Lesson two in avoiding accidental Catfish situations

• D Magazine: “Our editors and fact checkers go through a very rigorous process to determine these lists, and when it is misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented by someone claiming to have won when it was not actually bestowed upon them, it really undermines the prestige.”
• Glesby: “Ok, well, now you’re just using a bunch of words that I don’t understand. I’m an end-game person. Let’s just get to the end of this. If I take those two little logos off, are we all good? Because I can do that when I get to the office in the morning.”

Lesson No. 2: You should probably not admit you don’t know what fairly basic words (to an average middle class American, at least) mean when talking directly to the press. That’s now posted, Facebooked and tweeted, and unfortunately, all that will now show up on the first page of Google when innocent, unknowing prospective clients search for that agent to look up their experience will be the D Magazine debacle.

It does appear that finally, Glesby removed the D Magazine logos from her pages (although, I’m now left to wonder if any of these are misrepresented?). Glesby will continue selling real estate and her life will go on. But besides a warning to consumers to thoroughly investigate anyone they want to hire for any business, this is a prime example of an agent who makes the industry look bad, even if inadvertently. She is clearly young (and although she graduated SMU in 2010, she does not understand “misconstrued” or “misrepresented”), and this may be her first case of the Internet biting her in the butt – a misrepresentation of a logo instead of embarrassing photos/words she posted.

This may be her first case of the Internet biting her in the butt – a misrepresentation of a logo instead of embarrassing photos/words she posted (except for we found this online, and I’d call that embarrassing if I were trying to establish myself as a professional). Consumers don’t care about that, though, it’s just one more reason for them to be mistrusting of agents.

Hopefully, serious agents can perpetuate their own reputations for being stellar, honest, good at their jobs agents, and the industry can get rid of those who are willing to fake awards and trophies and are unwilling to understand why it would be bad.

Maybe when she was searching Google images she was looking for this photo of herself and stumbled upon the Best Agent logos? Man, you can find ANYTHING on a Google image search!