Did This Dude Really Spontaneously Send A Drone With His Phone Number To Land A Date Because The Details Seem Shady At Best

NYC rooftop

Sean Pavone


If you haven’t seen the clip by now, it’s right below. The guy claims he saw some girl dancing on a rooftop and sent over a drone with his phone number and got a date. This went down in Bushwick, Brooklyn and it’s racked up more than 30 MILLION views on TikTok so far in addition to being shared across every other social media platform.

Watch the clip again if you’ve already seen it as a refresher:

True love in the making, right? That’s what the people want to believe. Since freelance photographer Jeremy Cohen filmed that clip last week millions of people have been enthralled by the story. But people immediately began to question its authenticity.

Why wouldn’t someone just jack the $1,000+ drone?

Over on OneZero, they’ve done a deep dive into what led up to this clip being filmed and what’s happened since then. Jeremy Cohen has gone from 15,000 TikTok followers to over 600,000. The girl in the video has since joined TikTok and amassed over 30,000 followers already. They’ve gone on two dates. In the first date, they FaceTime each other from their separate rooftops. That video has 10+ million views. And in the second date they go for a walk while he wears an inflatable plastic bubble.

He insists it’s 100% real which isn’t shocking but the details are sketchy. For starters, why didn’t we know that he had a friend on the rooftop? Why didn’t we know that friend was a popular YouTuber who was filming for him and who later followed up with the girl to text him back? Check out this portion of the OneZero article and then try to tell me this entire TikTok love story isn’t complete made-up bullshit:

When I reached Cohen by phone, he reiterated the same story featured in the original TikTok: that he simply glanced out his window, saw a girl dancing, and felt immediately compelled to send her a message via drone. “I can understand why people would think it was fake because it’s, like, almost too good to be true,” he said. “But it’s 100% real. I did not know her. I flew the drone from my roof to her roof, and then we started texting.”
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Cohen eventually told me that another previously unmentioned content creator was involved. The self-proclaimed “hopeless romantic” had a friend on Cignarella’s rooftop the whole time, who Cohen says helped document and shepherd along the TikTok.
Though there’s no indication that Cignarella knew Cohen beforehand, the events didn’t unfold quite the way it looks in the carefully edited viral video. Cohen said Cignarella was actually hanging out among a group of people rather than just dancing by herself. In that gathering was YouTuber and photographer Josh Katz, who Cohen said was present for the filming of the first TikTok. Katz and Cohen were both working on rooftop photography projects that week, and follow each other on Instagram. Did Cohen ask his friend to help set up the meet-cute for TikTok? He says he didn’t go that far, though he did say he told Katz to “film it on his phone” and to follow up with Cignarella when she didn’t initially text him back (her phone died, apparently).

Anyone who works on the Internet can see that this isn’t as authentic as we’re being led to believe it is. It’s eerily reminiscent of how The Chive first went viral years ago on DIGG, back when DIGG was more popular than Reddit, by faking some girl quitting her job in a viral stunt. Spend enough time online and you can easily spot these stunts.

When pressed for what really happened, Cohen says he “just honestly can’t remember exactly what happened” before the flipped on the cameras. And Cignarella (the girl) is saying she was only dancing because of the Mango White Claw. She goes on to state that zero New Yorkers know their neighbors which is actually the only believable detail of this entire story:

“On top of that, me and Jeremy had never met before. Not sure if y’all know any New Yorkers who actually know their neighbors, but they’re liars. I don’t know anyone who knows their neighbors,” she continued in the TikTok.

The entire case laid out on OneZero is compelling evidence that this was all staged but I think most people don’t need the evidence to know that it’s all bullshit.

If you need more convincing that something sketchy is going on here you can follow this link.