Hoax Museum Blog: Websites

Fly Derrie-Air — Derrie-Air claims to be the world's only carbon-neutral luxury airline. From its website:


The reality is that Derrie-Air doesn't exist. It's a fake company dreamed up by Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. In addition to creating the Derrie-Air site, they also ran Derrie-Air ads in their papers as a marketing test "to demonstrate the power of our brands, in print and online, to drive traffic awareness -- in this case for a brand that doesn’t exist and is fictitious." More details in Editor & Publisher, and on MSNBC.

I predict this will become a case of satirical prophecy, in that it won't be long before airlines actually are implementing measures such as charging by the pound. (Thanks, Rebecca)

KaleCoAuto — KaleCoAuto offers a variety of automobile parts and accessories you're unlikely to find anywhere else. For instance, they sell "seasonal air" for your tires, so you can make sure the air inside your tires is at the correct temperature for the season outside.

Other products include porcupine seat covers, a car-to-tank kit, and (my favorite) the "Round Tuit" (pictured) -- a multi-functional tool that is "a requirement to finish all those hard jobs that you keep putting off."

According to uwhois.com, the KaleCoAuto.com site is registered to Ronald McPothole who lives on 1986 Corvette Lane. I'm sure that's a real name. (Thanks, Jerry)

The Perfect Woman — Ai Robotics claim to have developed the "Perfect Woman." Her face is shiny and her movements jerky, but she does housework. From perfect-woman.com:


Also:


Check out this video of "Lisa" on YouTube:



I would call Lisa "creepy" rather than "perfect." I would also call her "an actress pretending to be a robot" rather than a "robot."

The absence of google ads on the perfect woman site suggests to me that it's some kind of art project. The site is registered to Etienne Fresse, so he, at least, might be real. (via dvice.com)

Child Trader — If you're tired of your kid, why not swap him or her for another? Childtrader.com makes this possible. From the site:


You can view the profiles of kids available for trade. For instance, Jacob (pictured) is described as, "Not a particularly impressive boy. He hasn’t much been into sports, but he does have a great smile and likes to sit around the house, so he is very quiet."

I'm willing to go out on a limb and declare this a hoax. I'm not even going to do any research into who the site is registered to, etc., because it's obviously a joke. In other words, you're stuck with your kids, even if you don't like them. It's not legal to swap them for another.

Links on the child trader site indicate it was created by the same person responsible for two other spoof sites: medicaladoptions.com (adopt a kid who is a perfect match for an organ transplant you need), and puppyprofits.com (make money from illegal dog fighting).

Childtrader.com does, at least, highlight that children aren't always a constant source of joy to their parents. It reminds me of a study conducted in 1931 by Dr. Mandel Sherman of the Child Research Centre in Georgia. Sherman asked thirty-two parents to keep track in notebooks of all the ways their children annoyed them. He found that there were 2,124 ways in which children annoyed their parents. The most common source of annoyance was disobedience, but other annoyances included being too slow, too quick, and spending too much time primping.

Talk To The Dead — Charlotte Paru writes in an email:


Nicole Zapruder's technique of talking with the dead involves something called the "Grey Walter - Berger Construct." Based on the video on the site, this entails looking into a stroboscopic light while a guy with a British accent repeatedly says "Look into the light."

But based on the high number of references the site makes to the recent movie The Orphanage, I'm guessing the entire site is, in fact, guerrilla marketing for that movie. So I'm playing right into their hands by posting about it, but I like horror movies, so I'm willing to give them some free publicity.

FairDeal Homeopathy — FairDeal Homeopathy promises it won't lie to its customers. They only guarantee that their remedies are "as effective as all other homeopathic remedies."

They also won't promise that their products can help you if you're ill. Although they do note that if you believe in their remedies they might help, because of the placebo effect. But they caution that if you're "actually ill" you shouldn't expect their products to cure you. "Homeopathy of any sort," they note, "is not a medical treatment, neither is it a substitute for evidence-based medicine and proper medical opinion."

On the testimonials page you find comments from "Miss Emily B. Leiver" and "Mr C. Lumsey." At which point it becomes obvious that the entire site is a parody. (Thanks, Terry!)

Update: I just received this email.



To which I replied:


And received this response:


So I suppose FairDeal Homeopathy is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it is real, in so far as it will sell people something.

Sperm For Tickets — Donate your sperm and get a ticket to a music festival. That's the deal offered by Sperm for Tickets.

Or rather, that was the deal. If you visit their site now, they state that the response far exceeded expectations, so they're temporarily calling a halt to the invitation.

But I'm pretty sure the offer never was for real. Not that the idea of giving tickets in exchange for sperm is that outlandish. Instead, it's the delivery method that seems bogus. The site claimed donors could send their sperm via mail:


Yeah, right.

The SciencePunk blog has traced the site to a Dublin-based marketing firm called Area52. Evidently it's some kind of publicity stunt.

I Buy Strays — The latest hoax website doing the rounds is IBuyStrays.com. I posted a page about it in the hoaxipedia.

The site purports to be a business that buys people's unwanted pets and resells them to research labs. Animal lovers, of course, are up in arms about this.

It's pretty obvious the site is a fake. Its over-the-top tone, if nothing else, gives it away:



The business the site describes is perfectly legal, and there are companies that do it... for now, at least. Legislation has been proposed to make this kind of practice illegal, because the companies involved in this business seem to be a pretty shady bunch who do things like acquire pets from "free-to-good-home" ads, or even steal them out of people's backyards, and then resell them to labs. Kind of like the nineteenth-century "resurrection men" who used to steal corpses from graves to supply medical labs.

Apparently the larger goal of the site is to raise awareness of the stray-animal trade and to encourage people to contact their congressmen and encourage them to pass the Pet Safety and Protection Act. For which reason, the site falls into the genre of Modest-Proposal-style hoaxes (i.e. hoaxes that, like Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, seek to shock people by seeming to advocate outrageous ideas).

Or whoever created the site could just be hoping to make a quick buck from the ads he's running on it.

Two Lists of Hoaxes — Blogissues.com has posted a list of the Top 15 Hoax Websites. And guess which site comes in at #11? Cranky Media Guy's Tom's Girl hoax! Congratulations, Bob!

One of these days I need to post my own list of the top hoax websites. It's one of those things I've been meaning to do for ages, but haven't gotten around to it.

Also, virtualhosting.com has a list of the Top 20 Hilarious and Creative Internet Scams. Some of their choices seem highly debatable. For instance, they include the question of whether, during the final episode of The Sopranos, "the man standing at the counter was Nikki Leotardo, Phil’s nephew who had been on the show before and who could have been out to kill Tony." How does that count as a creative internet scam? But it's their list. They can put whatever they want on it.

Sell My Dna — SellMyDna.com offers to help you sell a sample of your DNA to a research company, New Line Genetics, who will then obtain a patent for it. They pay $5000!

Better yet, you can even sell your friend's DNA, because once a cell leaves their body, it no longer belongs to them. From their website:

However SellMyDna.com is not a real company, as you can find out if you dig deep enough into it's site and come across the disclaimer: "these sites are a satirical “what if” pertaining to something that, for all intents and purposes, could be a reality in the not-so-distant future."

Wired's science blog reports that SellMyDna.com was created by Anthony Martin, whose myspace profile states, "I am striving to make the world a better place and usher in the new era of human evolution with the use of accelerated genetics techniques."

Quick Links: Dec. 4, 2007 — Tickle Me Counterfeit
Authorities are warning consumers to be on the lookout for fake Tickle Me Elmos showing up on store shelves this Christmas. How can you tell the difference between the real and the fake? For a start, the fake Elmo is called "The Laughing Doll." Also, oddly enough, the fakes are more expensive than the real thing.

Phony Doo-Wops
Doo-wop groups from the 1950s and '60s, such as the Drifters, Coasters and Platters, are complaining that they're going broke. They can't compete against all the phony groups pretending to be them who perform for less.

Underwater Scottish Gnomes
At the bottom of Loch Fyne can be found a secret garden inhabited by 40 gnomes. Apparently underwater gnome gardens are popping up all over the world. I last posted about one at the bottom of Wastwater in the Lake District.

Ingenious Disguise
After police pulled Robert Sadlon over for a broken taillight, Sadlon fled the scene on foot. He later reported his truck as stolen. The same cop who had pulled him over went to his house to investigate. There he found Sadlon, who now claimed to be a different man. He had disguised himself by shaving his mustache and changing his clothes.

Climate Change Culture Jamming Hoax
It appeared that a group of major corporations, including Chrysler and Dow Chemical, had gotten together to pledge to eliminate all their emissions in the next 50 years. It turned out that the pledge was an elaborate hoax engineered by a grassroots activist group called the International Rising Tide Network.

Quick Links: Dec. 3, 2007 — Pie in Santa's Face
"A 22-year-old University of Montana student was charged with assault Friday for shoving a pumpkin pie into Santa Claus’ face at a shopping mall while a teen sat on his lap."

Save the Park
Four students in the UK created a hoax website as a social experiment to test the influence of the media. Their website, savethepark.co.uk, claimed there were plans to build a 220,000 tonne waste incineration plant in a South London park. Within a few weeks their site had received thousands of hits, and they had been contacted by a newspaper. They claim that their experiment, "showed how rumours can spread and how easy it is to get information out there that isn't true." But also that, "we are still a community and we can still stand together."

Venezuelan Toilet Paper Shortage
"Venezuelans have been buying large amounts of toilet paper on rumours it could be the next hard-to-find thing amid shortages of products like milk and meat."

Death by Cell Phone Report Disputed
It turns out that the death of a South Korean man was not due to an exploding cell phone, as many media outlets recently reported. Instead, police are attributing the death to a co-worker who backed into him with a drilling vehicle, and then tried to frame the cell phone. (Thanks, Joe)

Prairie Tumbleweed Farm — Back in 1994 Linda Katz created a website which she named the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. At the time it was just a joke. She didn't really have a tumbleweed farm. She had dreamed it up as something to do while teaching herself web design. But it turned out that there really are people out there who want to order tumbleweeds. For instance, movie studios or people hosting wild-west parties. And they started to place orders for tumbleweeds with Linda. Now, according to Yahoo! News, Linda is earning over $40,000 a year selling tumblweeds. I find this quite inspirational, and I've been racking my brains trying to think of ways to duplicate her success. But the only idea I've been able to come up with so far is to start a San Diego Street Trash Farm. I don't think it would enjoy the same success. (Thanks to Cranky Media Guy for the link).

Music Faun Plastic Surgery — Hungarian plastic surgeon Dr. Lajos Nagy offers all the usual services at his clinic. You can get a breast enlargement, a nose job, liposuction, etc. But he also offers a rather unusual service: music faun surgery. He'll make your ears pointed so that you look like a music faun. His website, modernplasztika.co.hu, states:

Here's the description of what the procedure involves:

I think the post-operative pictures on Nagy's site look like people wearing fake ears, so my hunch is that music-faun surgery is a joke. However, I wouldn't be willing to state this definitively. After all, there definitely are people who get surgery to make their ears pointed.

However, Dr. Nagy's site is registered to smartworks.hu, a Hungarian graphics studio, which makes me feel pretty sure that neither Dr. Nagy, nor his music-faun surgery, are real. The site is probably some kind of art project.

Racelift — Racelift.com is the online home of the Institute of Ethnological and Racial Modification. The staff at the institute claim to have developed powerful new "Racelift Technologies" that allow you to change your race. For instance, among their testimonials is that of Hohepa Mikhailov, who transformed from what looks like a Russian sailor into a New Zealand Maori. His testimonial reads:
The site is pretty obviously a joke. If the dodgy science doesn't give away the joke, then the numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout the site should. (Thanks, Oz)

Porthemmet Beach — The website for Porthemmet Beach advertises that it is the best beach in Cornwall. It also claims that it's the only beach in the UK to allow topless sunbathing. So how does one find this beach? These are the directions on the website:
Apparently in recent months tourists have been trying to find this idyllic beach. But with no luck, because the beach doesn't exist. It's the tongue-in-cheek creation of Jonty Haywood, a teacher from Truro. According to the BBC, if people were actually to follow the directions to Porthemmet, they'd find themselves leaving the county. In an interview with The Independent, Haywood explained why he created the hoax website:

"Although I would like to claim there is an important underlying point being made here, there isn't. Sending tourists off to find an imaginary beach is funny."

(Thanks to Sarah Hartwell, messybeast.com)

Is my baby gay? — A website called Is My Baby Gay offers to inform you of your child's sexual preferences for a fee of only $19.99. They direct customers to print out a circle on a piece of paper. You're then supposed to apply the tongue of your baby to the center of the circle for 15 seconds. You mail this piece of paper to the "Is My Baby Gay" testing center, and they promise to get back to you with an answer within two weeks. If they turn out to be wrong, they promise that they'll refund 150% of your purchase price.

At first I thought this had to be a joke, but apparently they really will take your money. They've set up a paypal payment system to do so. Which transforms this from a joke into something more like a scam. [Note: I didn't actually try to pay them anything, so perhaps at the last minute they decline to take your money... but somehow I doubt it.]

On their front page they've included a phrase which is apparently their legal escape clause: "Results are intended for entertainment purposes only."

I'd like to think that no one would actually take this site seriously and mail in their baby's saliva sample. But there's probably someone out there dumb enough to think this might be for real.

Even dumber would be someone knowing there is no such thing as a saliva test for sexual preference, but paying $19.99 anyway just for the fun of getting some bogus results.

Bullet Proof Baby — Bullet Proof Baby is an online store that claims to sell "all sorts of light weight heavily tested military standard body armor for babys and toddlers." For instance, it offers bullet-proof strollers, bullet-proof cribs, infants 'my first' gas mask, baby bomb blankets, toddler tasers, baby riot helmets, and ultra light kiddie riot shields. Here's the description for the baby flak jacket.

It's all a thinly disguised promotional site for the new Clive Owen movie, Shoot 'Em Up, as evidenced by the numerous ads for the movie throughout the site. If you actually try to order anything, you discover that it's all out of stock.

Fake Al Sharpton Fools MSNBC — Newsgroper is a parody site full of fake celebrity blogs. To make sure that no one confuses its content with real news, it posts the warning "Fake Parody Blogs, Political Humor, Celebrity Satire, Funny Commentary" in the title bar of every page.

Apparently, this warning wasn't enough for MSNBC's Alex Johnson. In a piece about Michael Vick, he quoted from Newsgroper's fake Al Sharpton blog, presenting the following quotation as if it were something Sharpton really had said:
Caught in the blunder, MSNBC quickly removed the quotation from the article and posted this correction:



To me, the self-serving correction is worse than the original mistake. The fake Al Sharpton blog isn't a hoax. A hoax is a deliberate deception. Since the Al Sharpton blog announces right in the title bar that it's a parody blog, it hardly counts as a hoax.

MSNBC should retract their correction, and admit they're victims of sloppy reporting, not of a hoax. (Thanks to Cranky Media Guy for the link.)

Camp Okutta — Posters for Camp Okutta have recently been appearing in various Canadian cities. Camp Okutta is described as an adventure camp for kids. But in addition to normal activities such as hiking and games, kids also get a summer of "throwing grenades, shooting AK-47 assault rifles, and receiving minefield training — all for children aged eight through 12."

Some people have been so outraged by the signs that they've ripped them down. Sarah Heywood is one of these people. She told CBC News that, "I immediately thought, wow, this is real, this is happening, people are now actually providing these kinds of services and opportunities for people who actually allow their children to go and experience something like that here in Canada."

Actually, the posters are a marketing hoax designed by War Child Canada. The intention is to raise awareness about camps around the world training child soldiers.

Below is a video ad, posted on YouTube, for Camp Okutta. Also check out Camp Okutta's website.

This reminds me of an earlier (and still ongoing) ad campaign in a similar vein: The Coalition to Promote the Use of Child Soldiers.