Simrin, however, isn't dead.

He just thought it would be fun to trick people into thinking he was, so he decided to start leaving comments on dozens of Instagram accounts telling others to go comment RIP on his pictures. His hope, he told Engadget in an interview, was to go viral. And that he did: "Hey guys, can u guys comment RIP in my most recent pic because i want my gf to think i'm dead, my family and i recently moved and she wants to keep that relationship, i really want to move on, it was a toxic one." That comment from Simrin has turned into a trend that's being copied and you can see variations of it all over Instagram, especially on celebrity accounts, which are heavily trafficked and give users the sense that their prank has a higher chance of succeeding.

Simrin said he actually had another picture with more than 10,000 comments, but that Instagram removed it for violating its Community Guidelines "on violence or threat of violence." He said this happened because two Twitter users made a meme out of him on August 28th, after seeing his comment on Rapper Travis Scott's Instagram page, which has 12 million followers. What those accounts did was take screenshots of his Simrin's trick comment (he wasn't really in a toxic relationship) and then mocked the fact people were actually going to his pictures to say RIP. One of the tweets alone has racked up more than 300,000 likes and 150,000 retweets, and Simrin said they're ultimately the reason his last picture on Instagram has so many likes and comments.

Between August 24th and August 30th, Simrin's Instagram page was discovered by 250,000 other users and his profile was visited 316,000 times, according to screenshots he shared with Engadget. Simrin said people are still commenting on his pictures, though not as much as when those tweets helped him go viral for a few days. "The idea just popped up in my head," he said, adding that he wasn't aware of anyone doing the "RIP thing" before he started to spam accounts on his own. "I decided to start doing it because why not give it a shot [and] do something new that [you] can entertain yourself with?" Simrin said. "People get famous from doing anything these days."

"I decided to start doing it because why not give it a shot [and] do something new that [you] can entertain yourself with. People get famous from doing anything these days."

Not everyone gets the same reaction as Simrin did, but that doesn't keep people from trying to go viral themselves. If you go to Kim Kardashian's latest Instagram photo, one of the first comments you'll see is from a "benittoferretto" account, who seems to have copied and pasted Simrin's prank in hopes of getting people to go his most recent picture and say RIP. So far, though, that comment has a single like.

Another comment, on the "sneakernews" Instagram page (which has 7.5 million followers), "riccardomancaa" said, "Can y'all comment RIP on my latest photo so people think I'm dead and so I cannot go to school." A lot of the replies to these comments seem to be "stop" or "this shit getting corny" (as user "boobaveli" put it), which indicates people are seeing it often across Instagram.