The story of a US hacker arrested for approving food stamp applications? It was fabricated
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on December 30, 2019 at 16:08
- 2 min read
- By AFP Ethiopia, Amanuel NEGUEDE
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The original post and tweets have been archived here and here.
They describe how he was detained after hacking the county’s human services department’s network and approving all applications for food stamps by mailing cards to new applicants, “all totaling $2,500 dollars each”.
Current cardholders were also reported to have benefitted by the same amount.
The post has the Fox news network logo in the top left corner.
The same story was also shared via the website nsfnews.com more than 10,000 times on Facebook, according to data from social media analysis tool CrowdTangle.
Nfsnews.com is a prank website that allows users to create memes and share them on social networks.
On Twitter, Dempsey openly admits to the joke -- as he does with another prank report which also sports his “mugshot” and makes similar claims about hacking for the benefit of people in need.
In the second post, it is claimed that a Jackson man hacked a college computer and returned all fees to students from 2010. This post was also shared widely across different social media platforms.
Chakabars, the name of an Instagram star with more than 700,000 followers, also shared a similar claim in a post that was liked more than 31,500 times.
Self-styled prankster Dempsey said on Twitter that his intention was only to make people laugh.
“Y’all I just make funny joke posts.. it’s just for social media fun.. please don’t take me seriously lol.. just like to make folks laugh that’s all”. We’ve archived his Twitter post here.
AFP has asked Dempsey for comment -- we'll update this post with his response.
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