Hoax Museum Blog: Websites

Ann Arbor Public School Site — The website of the Ann Arbor Public School system can be found at http://www.aaps.k12.mi.us/. A parody version of it (created by an unknown author) is at http://annarborpublicschools.org/. Apparently the school district doesn't find the parody amusing, because they're sending its domain host a cease-and-desist letter claiming infringement of their intellectual property. The two sites do look very similar, but I don't think their case would hold up in court. After all, parody relies upon copying elements of whatever it's making fun of, and parody has always been a "fair use" exception to copyright that the courts have strongly defended. However, the question will be whether the case ever gets to a court. Often domain hosts see a cease-and-desist letter and immediately take down the material in question rather than risk any kind of legal action. We'll have to wait and see what happens here. But I took a screen shot of the parody site, just in case it does disappear.

Jesus Pets — Jesus Pets points out a serious problem that born-again Christians must face if they own a pet: Many Christians believe that animals do not go to heaven. So when Jesus comes back and you return with him to heaven, will there be somebody to take care of your dog or cat?

Happily, they offer a solution: We are assembling a community of heathen pet-lovers to care for pets that are “left-behind.” We are coordinating with feed mills and kennels in preparation for your post-apocalyptic pet care needs.

Clearly this is tongue-in-cheek, though it's a clever idea. (I'd happily agree to look after someone's animal for a fee in case of rapture, since I anticipate being left behind.)

If you poke around the JesusPets site a bit more (follow the Jesus Links link), you'll find hundreds of pages full of links to religious sites. Each of these link pages runs google ads. So what I think is going on is that someone created the JesusPets page as a ploy to get lots of people (like me) to link to it, thereby increasing its pagerank. This, in turn, will increase the pagerank of all those link pages running the ads and, in theory, generate plenty of ad revenue. Whoever dreamed up this scheme is definitely going to be around post-rapture. (via J-Walk)

Hoax Websites of Lost — After getting the first season of Lost on dvd for christmas, I've become hooked on the show. Although I'm beginning to suspect that the writers of the show are simply going to introduce one mystery after another without ever offering an explanation for anything. But anyway, here are some hoax websites related to Lost: Oceanic World Air (the airline that the Lost passengers were flying on), Dharma Industries (the mysterious project that was being conducted on the island), and The Hanso Foundation (The philanthropic foundation funding the Dharma Initiative. This page is part of an alternate reality game, as is the Dharma Industries site). If you know of any other Lost-related hoax sites, let me know.

And here's something that isn't a hoax, but is rather curious. If you type the mysterious numbers from Lost (4 8 15 16 23 42) into google maps, they correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of an island in the middle of the Pacific. My guess is that this probably isn't an accident.

Update: A few more hoax websites of Lost:

http://www.driveshaftband.com (the website of Charlie's band. Thanks to Nordan for this link.)

http://www.mrcluck.com or http://www.mrclucks.com (websites of the fast-food restaurant that Hurley used to work in, before he won the lottery. As far as hoax websites go, these aren't very fully developed. The front page simply links to a podcast about the show.)

The island in the Pacific mentioned above is Kosrae Island (Thanks to Eric Schucard and Tim for this info).

Pherotones — Pherotones are ringtones that will make you "irresistible to the opposite sex." They're basically like pheromones, but they work via sound rather than scent. They're also a hoax. According to NewsTrend.com, the website promoting them is part of a viral marketing campaign dreamed up by the McKinney-Silver ad agency. NewsTrend writes:

The first mentions of Pherotones began around December 30, on "Dr. Vanderhood's" Pherotones blog, where the good doctor began posting "an ongoing diary of the life of a scientist on the verge of a major breakthrough." The JoniMueller blog caught wind of the Pherotones blog and posted about it on January 16. The real story began to break on January 18th with an Oreilly interview with Vanderhood.

The strange thing is that no one knows what this stealth marketing campaign is for. It seems a bit useless to attract all this attention, and then blow it by not revealing what you're advertising. (Thanks to Thilo for the link.)

Baby Bush Toys — We've already seen W Ketchup, so why not Baby Bush Toys? Their website states:

Sure, we all want what's best for our kids, but let's face the truth: not every child can grow up to be Einstein! At The Baby Bush Toy Company, we offer an exciting range of products for the resoundingly average child.

Products include a "Twisty Thing, That is Red" (shown in the thumbnail), and a "Terror Alert Xylophone." Unfortunately, none of these products seem to actually be for sale.

Banner of Heaven — Banner of Heaven is (or rather was) a weblog run by a group of mormons who wrote about their experiences trying to balance the pressures of daily life with the demands of their religion. The cast included:

Jenn: "a perky, 20-something Mormon, seeking an eternal mate in the Big Apple"
Mari: "the shyest character, got her neighbor's package by mistake and was afraid to deliver it to him in case he got mad"
Miranda: "the feminist who is disappointed in her husband's ambitions."
Septimus: "a divorced returned missionary with social anxiety and sweaty hands"
Aaron: "a wannabe prophet who sees God's hand in everything"
and Greg: "who isn't Mormon but hangs out with them."

The blog attracted quite a following in the Mormon community, but as an article in the Salt Lake Tribune reveals, it was a hoax. All the characters were fictional:

The storytellers were planning to out themselves by Thanksgiving. But two weeks ago, a group of readers got suspicious. Folks at ninemoons.com offered a free T-shirt to anyone who correctly identified the real people behind Banner's six characters. On Oct. 28, Gibson, Evans and the rest of the Banner gang came clean, publishing groveling mea culpas, apologizing to readers, acknowledging they got carried away. They are sorry for tricking and hurting people or fueling opponents of the LDS Church... Some critics of the LDS Church grabbed onto the Banner of Heaven episode as a parallel for the church's own founding, saying that it was like founder Joseph Smith claiming invented revelations. That is most upsetting to Banner creators who are all believing Mormons, Evans says. "Religion is more than telling a beautiful story, it's about truth."

By-Accident.com — By-Accident.com claims to be a company that will "deliver customized accidents such as rape, assault and past traumatic experiences. All personally tailored to suit your special needs." The idea is that you can fake a traumatic experience in your past, and thereby get all kinds of attention as a victim. The company will even provide (optional) Aesthetic Scar Surgery to make your past "accident" more believable: "You can have any physical damage you want, our trained surgeons promise it won't hurt and the result will be exactly as you wish."

By-Accident.com is a hoax. Satirical elements such as the Christmas Mugging Special make this fairly obvious: "Your chance to avoid stress and become the center of attention during the holiday season!... Get mugged and make sure to have a warm and happy winter!" In addition, the creator of the site didn't do much to hide their identity. The site is registered to someone called Barbara Nordhjem. A quick Google search finds a poster called Malach on pixelex.com stating that: "the page is a prank.. girl making it is a danish artist. Was working for me as a production assistant some time ago."

Of course, even though the site is a hoax, it does have a core of truth to it in that a company offering such a service definitely would find customers. Witness all the fake victims that popped up after 9/11. Victimhood is very appealing to a lot of people. (Thanks to Bob Pagani, aka Cranky Media Guy, for the link.)

Human Upgrades — I've received a couple of emails calling my attention to the Human Upgrades website. This group claims to be some kind of futuristic outfit offering bizarre DNA modification procedures such as Simplenose (giving people one large nostril instead of two), Simpletooth (fusing all the teeth into one long, continuous row), and other more sexually explicit modifications (some of the images are not safe for work). The site states that:

Human Upgrades was founded in 2001 by Doc. MUDr. FaVU. Petr Skala CSc. and his team from Institute of DNA Modification in Brno in Czech Republic. Since the contacts around the world and first class expiriences of the team Human Upgrades was able to offer unprecedented portfolio of surgeries based on the newest discoveries in the field of DNA manipulation.

All the text on the site is written in broken English, complete with misspellings. It seems that someone paid a lot of money to design the site, but never bothered to run the text past someone who can speak English. Anyway, the whole thing is obviously a hoax. The Institute of DNA Modification doesn't exist. The question is, who created the site? The main clue I can find is that all the contact information provides the addresses of European offices of the Bosch Group (makers of automotive and industrial technology). So either the contact information is a deliberate red herring. Or Human Upgrades is part of a strange marketing campaign created by Bosch's PR company.
Update: Another theory (because I find it hard to believe Bosch is responsible for Human Upgrades): There's a Czech film director named Petr Skala (same name as Human Upgrades supposed founder, and the registrant for humanupgrades.com). Perhaps he or one of his students created the site. Or perhaps this is yet another red herring.

Gene Guess — I received this polite request this morning:

Dear web master ,
Please review this website that is able to determine a persons sex just by four visual questions.
Name : Gene Guess .com
Link : http://www.geneguess.com
Thank you ,
Pras Til

So here goes: it worked for me, correctly guessing my gender. I suppose it was an interesting ten-second time waster. I don't know why it worked. Obviously it has a 50/50 chance of getting the answer right (unless you're a hermaphrodite, which might trip it up a bit). My theory is that the color choice question must be an important clue, since guys probably tend to pick darker colors than women.

Update: Based on everyone's comments, the gender guesses it makes appear to be totally random. The trick is apparently that it will be right half the time, thus half the people will think it works. And yet it did fool me into wasting time with it.

Panexa — Panexa is a drug you need to take, no matter what may, or may not be, wrong with you. As the Panexa site states:

No matter what you do or where you go, you're always going to be yourself. And Panexa knows this. Your lifestyle is one of the biggest factors in choosing how to live. Why trust it to anything less? Panexa is proven to provide more medication to those who take it than any other comparable solution. Panexa is the right choice, the safe choice. The only choice.

Now, Panexa is pretty obviously a parody of pharmaceutical advertising. For those to whom this isn't immediately clear, the Important Safety Information listed on the site should remove all doubts. (Side effects include: shiny, valuable feces composed of aluminum and studded with diamonds and sapphire... everything you think you see becomes a Tootsie Roll to you... inability to distinguish the colors 'taupe' and 'putty.') The Panexa site was created by Jason Torchinsky, who's a member of the comedy group the Van Gogh-Goghs and a contributor to Stay Free! Magazine (which interviewed me a couple of months ago, though I don't know if the interview ever ran in the magazine).

However, the parody was apparently lost on CafePress, which Stay Free! Magazine was using to sell Panexa t-shirts. Carrie McLaren, the editor of Stay Free!, reports that:

After a reader sent me a note wondering what happened to our Panexa merchandise, I noticed that Cafepress has removed it due to copyright and trademark infringement!... Apparently, one of the genuises in Cafepress's police division thinks Panexa is an actual product and that we are infringing. I sent Cafepress an email about this and am awaiting a response.

Maybe there are new copyright laws that prohibit anyone from making fun of pharmaceutical companies. Wouldn't surprise me a bit. (via J-Walk)

Mindbending Software — Mindbending Software claims to offer programs that will insert subliminal messages into the favorite computer games of your kids, thereby reprogramming them, as they play the games, to do as you wish. Their website states:

Mindbending Software Inc. is a company specialized on psychological conditioning software packages for children. With the newest technologies our products infiltrate the computer games of your kids and mingle various subconscious or conscious conditiong messages and images in the game contents. The technology can be compared with the subconscious pictures in the TV program, and if you don’t know about them, ask yourself why are you buying all those things you don’t need. You see it works ! Our software uses the same and some other patented methods to condition your kids. Try it out, if you aren’t satisfied you’ll get your money back!

Their subliminal control programs include the Tranquilizer™, Intellectualizer™, Selfesteemizer™, and Professionizer™. So is this real? Not really. It's an art project created by Robert Praxmarer. But what gets me is that he actually will allow people to buy the products listed on the site. Or, at least, he'll take their money. Click on the 'Add to Cart' button, and you'll be taken to a PayPal screen that will transfer money to his account. Most hoax sites, by contrast, carefully avoid taking anyone's money, because if they do take money and don't deliver what they've advertised, that's fraud. So maybe Praxmarer really will send some kind of "subliminal" software to people who pay for it. (He wants, on average, over $1000 per program.) But he could still be opening himself up to charges of fraud if the software doesn't work as advertised.

HETRACIL Anti-Effeminate Medication — According to the HETRACIL website, "HETRACIL is the most widely prescribed anti-effeminate medication in the United States, helping 16 million Americans who suffer from Behavioral Effeminism and Male Homosexuality Disorder." In other words, it's supposedly a drug to treat homosexuality. The look and feel of the site is pretty convincing, perfectly imitating the bland soothing nature of other pharmaceutical sites. And it's plausible that some drug company could try to devise such a product, given that up until the late 1960s the American Psychiatric Association actually did list homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders as a psychiatric disorder. However, as far as I know, no drug company is currently developing a treatment for homosexuality. In other words, HETRACIL is a hoax. This is revealed on homomojo.com in an interview with Benjamin, the creator of the HETRACIL site. The interview explains that "What he intended with these creations was to spur conversation on a “what if” scenario in which a cure for homosexuality (or at least feminine tendencies) becomes a reality. What would be the ramifications to society if sexual orientation could be manipulated?"

Google’s Dentist — I'm a bit late on this one, but it's odd enough to be worth recording for posterity. It was the blog of Sam Gustard, "Google's first full-time on-site dentist." As the blog explained:

After they hear this people usually ask why we need our own dentist, or they roll their eyes about supposed extravagence like the well-known free meals at work and so on. Actually, I'm surprised more companies of their size don't have their own dentist. Just do the math (I had to do some math in my interview also): with 3000 employees visiting the dentist twice a year on weekdays, that's 24 patients a day, which is more than a full load. Do you want those people staying at work or leaving the office for several hours each time? On top of that, the after-hours service is key because people here are night owls, and a dental emergency could leave someone unable to work for quite some time during a key product release.

It seemed logical enough (why shouldn't big companies provide on-site dental service to their staff?), and quite a few people fell for it. But when curious bloggers asked Google directly about their dentist, Google denied all knowledge of such a person, revealing it to be a hoax. Since then the GoogleTooth blog has disappeared, though it's still in the Google cache. And below are a few pictures of the office of Google's dentist.

China Invades Japan — A fake news article ruffled a few feathers over in Asia by reporting that China had invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa. In the context of growing tensions between the two countries, this was apparently believable to some people. Though there's no word on how many people fell for it. The hoaxers disguised their fake story as a Yahoo! News page. Usually fake news stories are easily spotted by examining the URL. If it looks like a Yahoo! News page, but it's not on news.yahoo.com (or whatever the Japanese equivalent is), then it's a good bet the story is fake. I haven't been able to find out what the URL of the hoax article was in this case.

Ashton Hacked — AshtonHacked.com supposedly offers up recordings of real messages left on Ashton Kutcher's voicemail, as obtained by two guys who hacked his cellphone. (Some of the messages are not safe for work.) Kutcher's media rep claims that all the messages are fake. The owner of the site, however, continues to insist they're real, though the explanation of how the voicemail system was hacked doesn't sound very convincing. Anyway, the messages would only be of much interest to people who actually care what Ashton Kutcher does with his time.

Babycage.net — Babycage.net has been selling "infant confinement" products (i.e. cages in which you can lock up your child) since 2001. Or so it claims. It also offers a Teenager Cage, which looks like it could be very useful. The company's philosophy is straight-forward:

At BabyCage.net we believe that the most important tool you need in life to succeed is discipline. Without discipline and structure, a child may become succeptible to liking rock and roll, doing drugs, or in an extreme case believing in liberalism.

Given that all the company's products are pet cages that have been rebranded as baby cages, I'm pretty confident the site is a joke. I'd categorize it in the modest proposal genre. (Thanks to azog for the link.)

Lesbian Phone Call — Michel sent an email asking whether the Lesbian Phone Call site is for real or not. A description, from the site, advertises that:

LesbianPhoneCall.com delivers you a phone call from a genuine lesbian!
For $10 one of our professional lesbians will call anywhere in the US or Canada. A member of our diverse lesbian staff will call you within three business days. Simply supply a name, telephone number and tell us what sort of lesbian you'd like. We do the rest! Order a lesbian call for mom!

It's hard to know if this was ever anything more than a joke. (They're currently not taking orders... if they ever did... so you can't call to find out.) I suspect it's a joke created by uncoolcentral.com, to whom the domain name is registered.

Outsourcing Blogging — I always feel guilty when I don't update my weblog regularly. Like when I was finishing my book and didn't have time to post, or this past week when I got the stomach flu and didn't feel like sitting at the computer. The guys at Blogoriented have an ingenious solution to this problem. They're outsourcing blogging:

We are outsourcing blogs to China. Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage... These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords... The long term goal is to generate a large untraceable astroturfing mechanism for launching of various products. When a vendor needs to promote a new product to the internet demographic we will be able to create a believable buzz across hundreds of ‘reputable’ blogs and countless message boards. We can offer a legitimacy to advertisers that doesen’t exist anywhere else. The second tier of our plan is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting.

All this smells a lot like a hoax to me. It also smells like a hoax to the author of this news.com article. If these Chinese bloggers have such a perfect command of English that they could effortlessly pass for "standard Americans," then they should blog as themselves. That would be more interesting than pretending to be American.

As for the blog vacation service, that's not a bad idea. I've thought about having guest bloggers step in when I don't have time to blog. Or I could invite readers to submit posts and pay a buck or two per post that I choose to put on the site (as a way to share the Google adsense revenue). Interesting thought.

Walken for President — Has Christopher Walken announced his intention to run for President of the United States? If you believe the press release posted on the 'Walken for Pres' site, he has:

09 August, 2005. New York - Early today, actor Christopher Walken, 62, held a private conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York in which he announced his intentions to run for the Presidency of the United States in the 2008 Election. Said the Queens native, “I have always been a follower of politics. My father was friends with the mayor of Schodack (NY) back in the 1940’s. We would walk the streets of Schodack and the people, they would wave to him. The children adored him. That is what I love to be, a man of respect and love.”

However, WorldNet Daily (which, I realize, isn't the most credible of sources, but in this case I suspect they're correct), reports a rumor that the Walken For Pres site is a hoax that is being perpetrated by members of the General Mayhem message boards.

MOTORmate — When I was writing my new book (which will be published April 2006) I wanted to include a picture of the Mini Cooper Autonomous Robot, which was an online hoax created by BMW's marketing agency. They were willing to give me permission to include the image in my book, however they objected to the fact that I referred to it as a hoax. I asked how they wanted it described instead. Their response: "It's not a hoax. It's a clever marketing campaign". So I think that's how I now refer to it in my book, though I put the term in quotes. Anyway, it looks like BMW's marketing team is still busy creating new 'clever marketing campaigns'. Alex Knight forwarded me this link to MOTORmate.com, which is a site that sells motoring accessories for Mini Cooper drivers. The accessories are pretty odd (such as a g-force indicator and a 'hey horn'). They're also very expensive. Which would lead one to assume that they're not real. But as far as I can tell, the site really is selling them. At least, the site was willing to take my credit card info when I clicked on the buy info, which is usually a decent sign that something is real (unless it's outright fraud).