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For a man who makes his living out of slaughtering celebrities and distributing internet porn, Rich Hoover has a surprisingly well-tuned moral compass.
His website, FakeAWish.com , has been hoaxing the internet and media with bogus news reports for about a decade, but the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett in June and the rise of social media have kicked his site into overdrive. Diddy, George Clooney, Harrison Ford and other celebrities had also met their demise.
Within a day of Jackson’s death, blogs, mainstream media, Twitter and Facebook lit up with reports that Jeff Goldblum, Miley Cyrus, Ellen DeGeneres, P. Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise have been the subject of similar reports in the past.
They died, the reports claimed, in private plane crashes, on sinking yachts and after falling off a cliff in New Zealand.
Australia’s Richard Wilkins attracted worldwide ridicule when he announced, on Nine’s Today show, the “breaking news” that Goldblum had died.
Scrubs star Zach Braff, who allegedly committed suicide this week, went on Facebook and Twitter to dispel the rumours of his own demise.
The reports spread so quickly and so effectively that Goldblum went on the Stephen Colbert show to shoot down the rumours. His website generated – or at least perpetuated – all of these hoax celebrity death reports.
All of this brings a wry smile to Hoover’s face. A fake news story from “Global Associated News” is created and looks legit, until you read the fine print at the bottom of the page that says the story has been “100% fabricated”.
Users simply enter the celebrity’s first and last name and then choose their desired storyline from a list of prewritten templates.
But Hoover, 38, who runs several online businesses including porn sites and video sharing sites, says there is a line even he will not cross.
But Hoover, 38, who runs several online businesses including porn sites and video sharing sites, says there is a line even he will not cross. . He experimented with this in the past but decided it was too mean…
. that kind of takes the fun out of it – if you just stumble and fall off a cliff, it’s something that’s relatively harmless to one’s character and very easy to dispel and prove that it’s fake,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Atlanta