Man’s TikTok tricks Florida woman into travelling to North Carolina
An American TikTok star has been forced to apologise after his parody video tricked a woman into travelling for hours.
A US TikTok personality was forced to apologise after his parody video tricked a woman and led to her driving hours to see a picturesque lake apparently in the US state of North Carolina.
Zachary Keesee, 22, was behind the viral TikTok, who posted a stunning video of what he claimed to be Gastonia in North Carolina.
In reality, Mr Keesee’s video was shot in January 2020 at Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, a mountainous village with a crystal clear lake at its centre.
Mr Keesee, who lives in North Carolina, garnered more than five million views on the video, one of 19 in a “Not Carolina” series he started on TikTok.
The 22-year-old regularly jokes in his captions, uploading videos of picturesque European locations and mislabelling them as spots in North Carolina.
The Gastonia/Switzerland video was enough to fool Florida woman Olivia Garcia, who spotted Mr Keesee’s video and jumped at the chance to see the snow-capped village.
Ms Garcia, 26, went as far as roadtripping from her family home in Jupiter, Florida to check out the spot.
“I’m from south Florida, so the closet thing we have to mountains down here are landfills, which is why I was so excited when I saw the TikTok,” Ms Garcia told the Charlotte Observer.
“I had never heard of Gastonia before, but the name sounded like something out of a Disney movie.”
As the Garcia family drove closer to Gastonia, Olivia began to realise she might have been tricked, spotting “run-down gas stations” and no working bathrooms.
“I realised when we were like 20 minutes out that something wasn’t right,” she said.
“I’m sure there’s a nicer part of town, but we didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”
Mr Keesee said he felt bad about the situation.
“I told her I was sorry on her video,” Mr Keesee told the publication.
“She seemed to take some humour out of it, and said it was OK.”
Mr Keesee said his videos, despite being a joke, are constantly bombarded with commenters telling him he’s wrong.
“People are telling me how I have never been to Gastonia, or not from there,” Mr Keesee told The Charlotte Observer.
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“I’m sorry if they don’t understand the humour I intended with the videos, but hey, you can’t trust everything you see on the internet. Always research!”
Ms Garcia posted her own video laughing off the fact that she was tricked, encouraging her followers to be savvy on the internet.
“Moral of the story, don’t believe anything you see on the internet,” Ms Garcia said.
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