Friday, July 3, 2009

GMANews.TV Falls victim of a fake site, warns public

GMA News warned the public last week regarding a fake site that reports fake news. The fake site, which was hosted under www.000webhost.com, has been taken down as it is reporting a 404 error meaning none existing page as of press time.

000webhost.com, according to its site, is a user donations supported free web hosting service

MANILA, Philippines - GMANews.TV, the official news Web site of GMA Network’s News and Public Affairs, would like to warn the public not to fall for a phony Web site masquerading as our site.

The sham Web site has the URL http://gmanewstv.comoj.com/karatekidaids.htm, and recently it posted a fabricated news item entitled "KARATE KID" FAST FOOD with AIDS!!!" The bogus story was about a 14-year-old boy who was diagnosed with AIDS after eating in a Makati restaurant.

A screen shot of the bogus Web site carrying the Karate Kid story has been circulating in Internet forums apparently to discredit GMANews.TV and the restaurant.

Legitimate Web sites can easily be faked through digital photo editing software applications. In the case of the fake GMANews.TV Web site, the perpetrators obviously made a screen grab of the nation page that contained the Red Cross kidnapping story, altered the copied page with a bogus Karate Kid story and posted it online using an obscure URL http://gmanewstv.comoj.com/karatekidaids.htm. This Web site does not belong to GMANews.TV or any of its affiliates, including its parent company, GMA Network Inc. and its Internet unit, GMA New Media Inc.

A comparison of the fake Web site and the GMANews.TV will reveal these glaring differences:

  1. First, the fake Web site used all capital letters in the headline. These are not the style of GMANews.TV even if it is the end of the world.
  2. Second, the fake Web site used triple exclamation points. These are also not the style of GMANews.TV.
  3. Third, the fake Web site used a text font type that is different from the one used by GMANews.TV.
  4. Fourth, articles tagged as related stories were about the kidnapping of International Committee of the Red Cross in Sulu.
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Source: GMANews.TV

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