The Net's Most Heinous Hoaxes

Most online hoaxes are mildly annoying, and a few are hilarious. But propagating a false Amber Alert over Twitter? Plastering an epilepsy forum with flashing images? Not cool. We'll take a look at some of the Web's most heinous hoaxes over the years, and sprinkle in a handful of amusing ones.

The Amber Alert system -- a child abduction alert system broadcast over radio, TV, satellite radio and other media whenever a child is abducted -- was created after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas, in 1996. Recently, some users have also broadcast alerts over text messages and Twitter.

Last July, someone tweeted an Amber Alert for a 3-year-old girl. People responded by spreading the alert as fast and as far as they could. It turned out to be a false alarm. A similar sequence of panicked, rapid-fire tweeting followed another false Amber Alert that occurred in September.

How heinous is this? Though we're glad that no abduction occurred in either case, there's a disturbing "cry wolf" aspect to the story -- what happens the next time a real Amber Alert goes out? For eroding the value of a potentially vital line of defense against child abduction, this hoax sets the platinum standard for repugnance.

Paging PETA: In 2001, a group of enterprising MIT grad students put together a little Web site called Bonsai Kitten, which detailed how to grow a kitten in a jar for aesthetic purposes.

The site included tips on how to insert a feeding tube and a waste removal tube, and where to drill air holes "prior to kitten insertion." It also included a gallery of pictures of "Bonsai Kittens" and a guest book filled with love (and hate) mail.

The site was so realistic that it caused uproar among kitty enthusiasts and animal rights activists (including the Humane Society), and it eventually gained enough notoriety that the FBI investigated the site's authenticity (or lack thereof). But since no kittens were actually harmed in the perpetration of this hoax, we think it tends more toward the hilarious than the heinous.

Anonymous, a group of online pranksters, has been blamed for an array of notorious acts of Internet grief -- from uploading porn on YouTube to launching denial-of-service attacks on Scientology sites. Some of the pranks they allegedly pulled are a bit more serious, however, such as the Epilepsy Forum Raid.

In March 2008, an epilepsy support forum run by the Epilepsy Foundation of America was attacked with uploads of flashing animations. The National Society for Epilepsy, based in the U.K., fell prey to a similar attack.

The animations -- which were clearly intended to induce seizures and/or migraines in epileptics -- can be very dangerous for epilepsy sufferers. The attack was investigated by the FBI, which found no connections to the group Anonymous. Internet speculation has attributed the attack variously to The Internet Hate Machine, to 7chan.org, or to eBaum's World.

Bigfoot is alive -- OK, actually he's dead, and he's in a freezer in Georgia. At least, that's what The New York Times and other major news outlets reported on Aug. 14, 2008.

In the finest "made you look" tradition, two men from Georgia announced that they had found the body of Bigfoot and would present definitive proof (in the form of photographs and DNA) that Bigfoot existed. In fact, they revealed, they saw three other Bigfoots in the woods as they were dragging the dead beast's body back to their car -- possible evidence that these creatures had mastered the intricacies of contract bridge but had not yet learned to control their tempers over botched bidding. Quasi-expert Tom Biscardi, an inveterate promoter of all things Bigfoot (and perpetrator of his own Bigfoot hoax just three years prior), vouched for the men.

How bad is this? Not surprisingly, the body turned out to be a costume stuffed in a freezer. But an Indiana man fronted $50,000 on behalf of Biscardi for the "body," and is now suing the pair of hoaxers to get his money back. The most heinous part of this hoax is the fact that someone actually fell for it.

On April Fool's Day 1998, Mark Boslough wrote a fictional piece about Alabama legislators calling on the state government to pass a law that would change the value of pi from 3.14159 … to the "Biblical value" of 3. Boslough titled his article "Alabama Legislature Lays Siege to Pi."

Though the piece was originally posted to a newsgroup, it ended up being forwarded … and forwarded … and forwarded …

Alabama legislators began receiving letters from outraged scientists and civilians, but that's about as dangerous as the situation got. The funniest part of the hoax? It echoes an actual event: In 1897, the Indiana House of Representatives passed a resolution to change the value of pi to 3 -- luckily, irrationality prevailed and the bill died in the state Senate.

Taking a cue from Bonsai Kitten, a site called Save Toby used a creepy premise to throw animal rights activists into a tizzy.

The Save Toby saga began in the early days of 2005, when the site announced that its owners had found a wounded rabbit (which they named Toby) and nursed it back to health -- but then declared that if they did not receive $50,000 in donations for the care of Toby by July 30, 2005, they would be forced to cook and eat the rabbit.

The owners asserted that the site was not a hoax: They would, indeed, cook and eat Toby if they did not receive the money. Animal rights activists cried animal cruelty, to which the owners responded that they were doing nothing cruel to Toby -- in fact, they were trying to save him. Supposedly, the site collected more than $24,000 before Bored.com bought it, and Toby was saved. (By the way, possible inspirations from pre-Internet days for the Save Toby hoaxers aren't hard to find.) But holding a bunny hostage for ransom? Real classy, fellas.