Irish lad gets abuse for sharing name with Red Dead character

We’ve all seen it before.

Someone on social media is stuck with the same name as some celebrity, shopping chain or politician and they end up being on the receiving end of messages totally not intended for them.

Sometimes they are messages of praise and a lot of the time they are the exact opposite.

However, for one young Irish man, this case involved sharing the name of a totally fictitious character.

Cork man Brian O’Driscoll took to Twitter recently to point out that he shared the name with the antagonist in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The game which was released to much acclaim this month has been a major talking point considering how mbadive the series’ fan base is.

Unfortunately for O’Driscoll, fans have really taken the game seriously as they have continued to message Colm speaking to him as though he is the old western villain himself.

Speaking to Buzz.ie O’Driscoll said that the messages started earlier this month and have yet to subside.

“It started early in the morning of the 3rd of November where a guy messaged me saying he was going to kill me. As you can imagine, it was an alarming message to open from a random person at 2AM in bed” Colm said.

“I had no clue what it was about until he sent me a picture of the Colm O Driscoll character from Red Dead.”

Colm shared with us some of the abuse he has received mainly on Instagram following the game’s release.

O’Driscoll posted a Tweet about the coincidence sharing some of the messages he has received, however, he says that a constant stream of messages poured in as a result.

“The following day I received a few messages from different people. That’s when I put up the tweet which quickly started to go viral.”

“Since then I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of private DMs. I had to turn notifications off on all of my social media accounts.”

“It’s at the point where I don’t know how many unread Instagram DMs I have because it just says ’99+ unread’, and has done for over a week now.”

Despite some of the messages clearly just poking fun others contain some rather vulgar messages which Colm has taken very well.

Admittedly some are a lot funnier than others.

He also revealed that he doesn’t even own a console nor has he ever played the game before.

“I would definitely like to try it out. I’ve seen a number of people have been tweeting Rockstar and telling them they should give me a console and a copy of the game. Unfortunately, they haven’t reached out to me at all”.

Colm says that he has resorted to just ignoring all the messages that come in, and for his sake, we hope this all dies down sooner than later.