Busted! How we unmasked the man behind the Internet’s cruelest celebrity death hoaxes

BY JEREMY MASSLER & ADAM L. PENENBERG, at PandoDaily

In February, a site called eBuzzd.com reported that “92-year-old Hollywood icon,” Betty White, star of television sitcoms such as The Golden Girls and Mary Tyler Moore Show, had been “found submerged,” “face up” and “wearing a white nightgown” in a luxury hotel bath tub. The following month the site claimed that “Pawn Stars Funnyman,” Chumlee, had died “of an apparent heart attack” at the age of 31. A few days later Seinfeld actor Wayne Knight, who once played “Newman” the postal worker, had been “killed in [a] tractor-trailer accident.”

While other news sites (and on some occasions, tweets from these celebrities) quickly revealed the stories to be hoaxes, the fact that eBuzzd mirrored the design of celeb news and gossip giant TMZ, even copping the title “TMZ today,” ensured that many thousands — perhaps millions — of people were fooled. In several cases, even the friends and family of those “killed” by the site were suckered by eBuzzd’s stories.

And it’s not just death hoaxes: over the past months, eBuzzd has published page after page  of fake celebrity news – “Phil Collins loses right arm in a tragic accident,” Selena Gomez is pregnant with twins and Justin Bieber is the father, Tom Cruise quit Scientology “after heated interrogations,” former governor “Jesse Ventura carjacked in Mexico.”

(Perhaps made aware that the site infringed TMZ’s intellectual property, eBuzzd has since stopped using the name “TMZ TODAY” and has changed the design to be less similar, although it maintains TMZ’s red and black motif.)