When Jayson Blair got a job writing for The New York Times, he was a young man, straight out of college. He advanced quickly, despite frequent complaints about the quality of his work, and became a full-time staff reporter in 2001. He was promoted to the national desk in 2002. But in April 2003, a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News notified the Times about suspicious similarities between a story Blair had just written and one she had written a week earlier. More→

In early 2003 advertisements began to appear throughout Prague promoting a new hypermarket called Cesky Sen (or "Czech Dream") opening soon in the Lethany Fairgrounds. The ads appeared on billboards, at bus stops, in newspapers, and on TV. The store promised ultra-low prices, such as TVs for $19 and mineral water for pennies, and a special surprise for anyone who came to the grand opening on May 31, 2003.

On the day of the grand opening, hundreds of eager consumers parked their cars at the Lethany Fairgrounds and approached the store. They could see its bright colors in the distance. Shopping bags in hand, they ran across the fairgrounds, only to find... nothing but a 26x260 foot Cesky-Sen banner fluttering in the wind. This was the special surprise. More→

In July 2003, Las Vegas TV station KLAS-TV reported that a local company was selling “Bambi Hunts.” These were games in which men with paintball guns hunted naked women in the Nevada desert. Anyone could sign up to join in a "hunt", although it could cost as much as $10,000 per game. An international media frenzy ensued. Numerous critics denounced the hunts, pointing out that a paintball hitting a naked woman could seriously hurt her. Many questioned how such a thing could be legal.

Only after a week did it become widely apparent that there was no evidence the company had conducted any Bambi hunts. The company wasn’t currently accepting customers (it said there was too much negative publicity), and everyone who claimed to have participated in previous hunts was highly unreliable. Further research revealed that the company was only licensed to sell videos. If it had run commercial paintball games, it had done so illegally.

When the Las Vegas authorities threatened to bring charges against the company, its president, Michael Burdick, admitted that no real Bambi hunts had taken place. The story about the hunts had, he said, just been a “hook” to boost sales of a soft-porn video about a fictional Bambi Hunt. The hook worked. Though their stunt almost got them run out of Las Vegas, Burdick’s company sold thousands of copies of the video.

July 2, 2003: Gerald McSorley, a Scottish pensioner, found a fossilized section of a plesiosaur vertebrae when he accidentally tripped and fell into the loch. Nessie enthusiasts speculated the fossil might have come from an ancestor of the monster. But subsequent examination revealed the vertebrae were embedded in limestone not found near Loch Ness, and the fossil showed signs of having recently been in a marine environment. In other words, it was clear the fossil had been planted at the loch.

The website of Colin Mayhew offered details on how this eccentric, but apparently brilliant, engineer had built an "autonomous crash-preventing robot" from the body of a BMW Mini Cooper r50. Video showed the humanoid robot in action, stopping a car from crashing into a wall. The Mini Cooper Autonomous Robot was eventually revealed to be an elaborate viral marketing campaign designed to promote the new Mini Cooper. More→

In 2004, it was uncovered that Jack Kelley, one of USA Today's most respected reporters, a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, had been fabricating major news stories at least since 1991. More→

In March 2004, a photo circulated online showing an American soldier posing with two Iraqi boys. One of the boys was holding a sign that read, "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!" The Council on American-Islamic Relations saw the picture and complained to the Pentagon about it. The photo also received coverage in publications such as Islam Online. But it turned out that there were multiple versions of the photo in circulation. In another version the sign read "Lcpl Boudreaux saved my dad then he rescued my sister," and in yet another version the sign read "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then all your Base are Belong to us." Obviously the sign was being digitally manipulated, but which was the real version? Eventually the Marine Corps opened an investigation to answer this question. The results of this investigation were not publicly released. Lance Corporal Boudreaux himself insisted that the sign originally read 'Welcome Marines'.

A chart that circulated online during the first months of 2004 purported to show that American states whose populations possess higher average incomes and higher average IQs voted for Gore in the 2000 Presidential elections. Their poorer, lower-IQ counterparts voted for Bush. The implication was that smart people vote Democratic, and stupid people vote Republican. Major newspapers and magazines, including the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, printed the chart before it was exposed as a hoax. More→

On May 1, 2004 the British Daily Mirror published pictures of Iraqi prisoners allegedly being tortured by British soldiers. The photos generated immediate controversy, as critics pointed out many features of them that seemed suspicious. First of all, they looked posed. The 'prisoners' did not appear to be injured or even sweating. And the British soldiers were wearing incorrect uniforms and driving vehicles not deployed in Iraq. Two weeks later the Daily Mirror admitted it had been duped and fired its editor, Piers Morgan.

The comedian Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984. But twenty years later, on May 16, 2004, a press release announced that he was still alive and living in New York City on the Upper West Side. Simultaneously, a blog authored by Kaufman appeared online. The press release explained that Kaufman had merely faked his death twenty years ago. But now he was back! During his life Kaufman had been fascinated with the idea of faking his death, and had even promised that if he did 'pull an Elvis' he would return 20 years later to tell everyone about it. Consequently there was a flurry of speculation on the internet about whether Kaufman really had returned from the dead. There is no evidence he had. After several weeks, the joke got old for whoever was behind it, and new posts stopped appearing on Kaufman's blog.

Norma Khouri's bestseller Honor Lost (published in Australia, Khouri's home, as Forbidden Love) told the story of a Jordanian 'honor killing.' Dalia, a young woman living in Jordan, falls in love with a Christian man and is murdered for this transgression by her father in order to defend the 'honor' of the family. Khouri claimed the story was nonfiction, based on the life (and death) of a woman she met while growing up in Jordan. But the Sydney Morning Herald discovered that Khouri did not grow up in Jordan. She actually grew up in a suburb of Chicago. And no person matching the Dalia character appears to have existed. Khouri's book was revealed to be fiction. The Australian publisher of the book withdrew it from sale.

On 8 September 2004, Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes that CBS had obtained documents revealing that President Bush had disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard and had then used his family's influence to cover up his poor service record. The documents allegedly came from the files of Col. Killian, Bush's commanding officer in the Guard. Rather's news report generated controversy almost immediately. Bloggers pointed out that the documents in question looked as if they had been written in Microsoft Word, which would not have existed when Bush was serving in the Guard. Initially CBS paid no attention to the bloggers, but when it realized that its source for the documents, Bill Burkett, had lied about how he obtained them, it decided that it could no longer vouch for their authenticity. Rather apologized for airing the story.

On December 3, 2004 the BBC broadcast an interview with Jude Finisterra, who claimed to be a representative of Dow Chemical. The date was the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, and the BBC had sought out a representative from Dow to speak about the tragedy since Dow had inherited responsibility for the disaster via a corporate acquisition. During the interview, Mr. Finisterra shocked the BBC's audience when he said that not only had Dow decided to accept full responsibility for the incident, but that it was going to pay $12 billion in compensation to the victims. In response to the news, Dow's stock value promptly dropped. More→

Samukeliso Sithole was a rising female star in the world of Zimbabwe athletics. The 17-year-old track-and-field athlete had won awards at various regional athletic events, including five gold medals at the Southern Region Youth Championship in 2004. But in 2005 her career came to an abrupt halt when it was revealed that she was actually a he. More→

March 2005: Two American students visiting Scotland claimed to have found an enormous tooth (possibly belonging to Nessie) lodged in the carcass of a deer along the shore of the loch. However, (so they said) a game warden who happened to be passing by almost immediately confiscated the tooth from them, though not before they got a few pictures of it. The students subsequently created a website to publicize their find and lobby for the return of the tooth. But animal experts identified the "tooth" from its picture as the antler of a roe muntjac deer. The website and accompanying story then turned out to be a publicity stunt for a horror novel by Steve Alten titled The Loch.