Virgin hoax fools media
The Toronto Sun had to backpedal after a story it broke (and played up big time) on Tuesday about a virgin claiming to need 5 million hits on his website within 30 days in order to have sex with a female friend turned out to be false. The site, the whole tale, was a hoax. As one might imagine, the salacious story garnered a ton of media attention when it broke. Then the bottom fell out. The truly galling thing about this is that the Sun, who fell hard for the tale and brought many others down with it, then took credit for exposing the hoax in a follow up story:
eLay? Try eLie.
A group of Toronto
friends are behind the latest Internet hoax that swept the web,
resulted in more than 20 fake interviews with media outlets across
North America, but fell apart after the Sun exposed problems with their
story.
…after it ran the initial story. Classy. Tons of articles about this here. Tip of the mouse to the Toronto Star’s Antonia Zerbisias for her post about this.
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