When You Plan a Mass Media Hoax, Put a Little Effort Into It

On Sunday night, a 16-year-old girl home alone tweeted that she needed help as someone was breaking into her house. Her parents came home to find a door open and their daughter gone. Police then found even more interesting things, like there was no forced entry and that the girl had called for a cab that picked her up at the same address. If you're going to fake your own kidnapping, the least you could do is trash the place up a little, show signs of a struggle, maybe walk an extra mile to pick up a bus. I mean, do something.

Before it was clear that Kara Alongi's kidnapping was a hoax, her tweet started to get picked up and retweeted over 34,000 times and the hashtag #HelpFindKara started to trend globally, overtaking my own hashtag #HelpFindIanAMailOrderBride (I'm still looking, FYI). But the hoax came to a crashing halt when police picked Alongi up while walking up a New Jersey highway (how they found her scent with the stench of landfill in the air, I don't know).

While Alongi's hoax didn't really hurt anyone (if you don't include plugging 911 up with bogus tips, her parents' psychological state and any police who took their eyes away from real crime in order to appease the whim of an angry teenage girl), it still makes me think back fondly on times when it took more than a simple tweet to start a nationwide hoax.

People used to have to work hard in the media to really pull one over on people. So below are my favorite mass media hoaxes.