Local weaboos (I’m looking at you!) have been accused of making up fake Japanese girlfriends since ye olde Friendster days. Apparently, this nasty habit of people with more free time than sense has wormed its way into Web 2.0, with hilarious and embarrassing results.

Lamer gamer Peter Coffin has been egging on Singaporean glamour blogger Xiaxue for the better part of his lifetime, until the petit Photoshop and plastic surgery enthusiast had had enough, and fired back to devastating effect.

Thanks to some impressive Google-fu and an uncanny insight into human nature, Xiaxue discovered that Peter’s pretty Japanese GF Kimi (who had also chimed in on Xiaxue and Peter’s ongoing feud), was none other than Peter himself posting with a faked account. If the entire debacle was a movie, it would be entitled “Forever Alone“. Here are five things Peter should’ve kept in mind when he cooked up the Kimi Kobayashi scheme:

Establish her online presence before introducing her as your “girlfriend”.

Girlfriends don’t just come out of the blue (although this one will). You need to establish her online presence days or even weeks before you can claim her as your girlfriend to anyone who gives a fuck. You need to make her a Facebook account and maybe one or two e-mail addresses. You also need a Twitter account, a DeviantArt account if she’s a “manga-ka”, a Cure account if she’s a “hot cosplayer”, and maybe some accounts on Steam or the Bioware forums if she’s a “gamer”.

Make not just one, but a whole plethora of fake online identities.

You can’t just have one fake account so you can pretend to be your own Japanese girlfriend: you need to make her family’s profiles, her friends’ profiles, her coworkers’ profiles, her favorite Starbucks barista’s profile — basically one profile for every single person who will make up her social network. It will make her more believable, since she “interacts” with a number of other people besides you.

Use your Google-fu to find appropriate pictures, but be selective of which pictures to use.

Once you find a likely candidate to stand-in as your fake Japanese girlfriend and start re-uploading her pictures, do a double check on the photos before sharing. Make sure they do not belong to anyone remotely recognizable — skip the idols, AV stars, models and cosplayers. Most importantly, make sure they are the correct nationality — you can’t claim she’s Japanese if there is Korean or Chinese writing all over the background.

Don’t make her talk like you.

Everyone has a unique way of speaking and writing — writers’ workshops call it your “voice”. Pay close attention that your voice and your fake GF’s voice do not sound too much alike. If you like, get an accomplice to write her lines for you. However, knowing Peter and that fact that he is unlikely to have any real friends — here’s another trick you can use: go to Google Translate, type out your sentence in the text box, translate to Japanese (or German, or Portuguese, or … something), copy the translation, paste it back into the text box, and re-translate back to English. Viola!

Lastly and most importantly, do not draw too much attention to her.

Unlike ten or even five years ago, when a lot of people could not tell a real person’s account from a fake one, it is really difficult to fool today’s internet users into thinking that a fake account is actually real. If you want to keep up the charade, do not draw too much attention to the fake account — once people suspect that the account owner is not who she says she is, they are more likely to want to rat her out and expose her (and her puppet master) for the fake she is, rather than leave her and you alone.

Results are not 100% guaranteed, but do drop me a line if you and your fake Japanese girlfriend find this post useful. Toodles~

Photos borrowed from Xiaxue’s irrepressible blog.