The Melbourne radio presenter Tom Elliott has been caught out interviewing an imposter pretending to be the rapper 360, just months after he featured a fake Isis commander on his program.
A man claiming to be the Australian artist, whose real name is Matt Colwell, was on Elliott’s 3AW program on Monday to debate racism.
“I am legally blind in my right eye and I can see Australia is inherently racist,” the imposter told Elliott.
A vigorous discussion ensued, which took a strange turn when the fake Colwell suddenly asked: “If you’re right and I’m wrong, then why was I inducted into the Illuminati and you weren’t?”
“I’m an enlightened being,” he went on. “I’m a unicorn. Who are you to say I’m not a unicorn?”
The fraudster then raised Elliott’s “exclusive” interview in August with Isis commander Omar al-Shishani – who turned out to be a Kurdish prankster living in Scandinavia pretending to be the notorious terrorist.
“Last week didn’t you interview an Isis fighter who turned out not to be an Isis fighter?” he asked.
Elliot replied: “Yeah, we did, and we made a mistake with that and we regret that. We do as much [research] as we can, but if you’re trying to get someone via Twitter from the Middle East, you take a risk, because there’s no way of checking.”
“What about someone who lives in Brighton in Melbourne?” the interviewee asked.
Elliott replied: “Well that you probably could do.”
From his official Twitter account, Colwell wrote:
I just got told that I was about to be interviewed live on @TomElliott3A about my comments on QandA... Hey Tom, it wasn't me.
— 360 (@3ree6ixty) November 3, 2014
Colwell added: “You’d think after making the mistake once, you would do everything in ur power never to make that same mistake again.”
He also posted a video of himself listening to the fake Colwell being interviewed.
