Hoax Museum Blog: Pranks

Bank Withdrawal Prank —
Status: Prank that backfired
The Brainerd Dispatch (requires registration) reports on an April Fool's Day prank that went slightly wrong, ending up with the prankster, a 57-year-old woman, getting charged with disorderly conduct:

About 10:15 a.m. Saturday, the woman stopped at Wells Fargo Bank at 424 W. Washington St. in Brainerd to make a legitimate withdrawal from an account. When she was finished, she handed the teller a note that read, "I'm here to take money," said Brainerd Police Chief John Bolduc... a bank employee called 911 indicating the bank was being robbed. Officers from Brainerd and Crow Wing County responded to the bank but the woman had left, Bolduc said. She was stopped by a Crow Wing County sheriff's deputy a short time later at Highways 18 and 25 in east Brainerd, where she was arrested for disorderly conduct and taken to the Crow Wing County jail.

I guess banks, like airports, are one place where you don't want to joke around about security issues.
Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2006.   Comments (7)

Top Ten Office Pranks —
Status: April Fool Pranks
CareerBuilder.com has issued a press release listing what they have determined to be the top ten office pranks, based on a survey of 2500 office workers. Here they are:

1. Change the caller ID on a co-worker's phone to read Mr. Kitten every time he calls someone.
2. Place random objects from people's desks in the vending machine.
3. Place a live goldfish in an IV bag in a clinic.
4. Sneak onto someone else's computer and send out an "I love you" email to the entire office.
5. Wall-paper someone's entire cube with headshots of his co-workers.
6. Pull the shelves out of the break room refrigerator, hide inside and jump out at co-workers as they open the door.
7. Sit on the copier and place the copies back in the paper bin. Anytime co-workers make copies, they have the image of the prankster's backside in the background.
8. Turn all the clocks in the office one hour back to make the work day seem longer.
9. Lock all the doors, shut off the lights and put a "Closed" sign in the window when the boss went out for lunch.
10. Place fake rubber chocolates in the break room and watch as co- workers try to chew them.

Which reminds me of another office April Fools prank someone told me about. (They swore they participated in it.) On April 1st everyone in the office quit, filing into the HR person's office one after another. Almost caused the boss to have a heart attack. Of course, the danger with that prank is that you might not get rehired.
Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006.   Comments (31)

Victoria’s Secret Basketball Prank —
Status: prank
image Here's a prank that definitely rates as one of the more inventive (and cruel) student pranks of recent years. The set-up occurred a week before a NCAA game pitting UC Berkeley against the University of Southern California. USC's starting guard, Gabe Pruitt (pictured), met a UCLA coed named Victoria online. They traded messages via AOL Instant Messenger. She sent him her picture. He sent her his. They arranged to meet after the game on March 4.

The sinker occurred during the March 4th game. When Pruitt appeared on the court, UC fans started to chant "VIC-TOR-IA, VIC-TOR-IA." Their chants continued throughout the game, escalating to include the recitation of Pruitt's phone number. Transcripts of Pruitt's IM chats with "Victoria" were also circulated throughout the crowd (including classic lines such as "You look like you have a very fit body... Now I want to c u so bad"). Pruitt was visibly shocked, missed a bunch of free throws, and ended up 3-for-13 from the field.

It turned out that "Victoria" didn't exist. She was the fictional creation of a couple of UC fans. Pruitt had been punk'd. Understandably, some USC fans aren't too happy about the prank. (So are they plotting revenge?) (via Deadspin and Schneier on Security)

By coincidence, a similar prank was in the news last week (though it was far creepier and more disturbing in its implications). Five boys created an online profile of a fictitious 15-year-old girl they called "Jessica." To their surprise, a 48-year-old guy contacted "Jessica" and started to chat her up. The five boys played along, and eventually lured the guy into meeting Jessica in real life. But when the guy showed up for the meeting, it was the police, not Jessica, who were waiting for him.

Both these incidents go to show that you never really know who you're talking to on the internet. Or as Reality Rule 6.3 from Hippo Eats Dwarf states: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (It makes more sense if you see the cartoon it refers to.)

Related Posts:
Jan. 6, 2004: Vixen Love
Sep. 6, 2005: Skype Prank
Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006.   Comments (10)

MIT Dome Wins Gold Medal —
Status: Prank
image Pranksters at MIT struck again last week. On Tuesday morning school officials discovered a massive Olympic gold medal hanging from the MIT dome. News reports state:

MIT officials said the medal was likely a prank, but they did not know how it was done or who did it. The school also said it never gave permission for the building to become a gold medal winner. The school has not said how long the medal will stay.

The MIT dome, of course, has been the focus of many, many pranks over the years. The first dome decoration dates back to 1961 when a giant Happy Birthday banner was hung from it. In 1962 it was made to look like a grinning jack-o-lantern. In 1979 it became a giant breast with a large nipple protruding from the top of it. Also in 1979, a fiberglass cow was placed on top of it. In 1986 a prefabricated house appeared atop it. In 1998 it grew a pair of giant Mickey Mouse ears. And in 2003, the Wright brothers plane mysteriously landed on top of it.
Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006.   Comments (8)


Bob Pagano Wins $365M Powerball Lottery —
Status: Hoax
Alan Abel has struck again, this time with the help of a regular here at the Museum of Hoaxes, Bob Pagani (aka Cranky Media Guy). Bob pretended to be the winner of the $365M Powerball lottery. (The real winners were a bunch of meat packers.) Apparently Abel helped behind the scenes. The action took place on Monday, but I didn't hear about it until today when I got an email from a reporter at the Des Moines Register asking me if I had heard about the Powerball Prank, and what I thought about it. A quick news search pulled up this article:

On Monday, a man who said he was an unemployed trucker from Omaha named Bob Pagano showed up flashing cash in Lincoln at a local Village Inn restaurant, claimed he was the winner and bought everybody in the place dinner. But Pagano said he had picked the winning numbers, while lottery officials said the winning numbers were a "quick-pick" generated by computer. Also, the photocopy of what Pagano claimed was the winning ticket said it was bought on Sunday, Feb. 17. Sunday was Feb. 19. The drawing was on Saturday, the 18th.
Alas, it was learned Tuesday that the man's name actually was Bob Pagani - not Pagano. Pagani is a cohort of Alan Abel, who has long been known around the world for putting on elaborate hoaxes. "Bob Pagani has been a confederate of mine for 25 years," Abel told The Associated Press.
Abel said he and Pagani noticed the gaffe on the date printed on the photocopy of the purported winning ticket just before launching their ruse.
"It was a goof," he said. Pagani said he'd been planning a Powerball hoax for about a year.
"He held court for about three hours at the Village Inn restaurant," Abel said. "He was swarmed."


More details from Bob himself should be forthcoming soon!

On a historical note, this isn't the first time Abel has engineered a lottery prank. He pulled the same prank back in 1990. On January 8, 1990 Charlene Taylor held a party at the Omni Park Central Hotel in mid-Manhattan to announce that she was the winner of the recent $35 million New York lottery. She told the media that the winning numbers had been revealed to her in a dream by Malcolm Forbes and Donald Trump as they flew around on a magic carpet. All of this was duly reported by the New York press. A day later the media realized that Taylor wasn't a lottery winner. She was actually an actress hired by Abel. The New York Daily News was the only paper not to fall for the hoax, because its reporter had recognized Abel standing in Taylor's hotel room.
Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006.   Comments (17)

Message In A Bottle Crosses Atlantic —
Status: Undetermined
image The story of Harvey Bennett and his ocean-crossing bottle has been widely reported during the past week. The basic facts are as follows: Harvey Bennett, the owner of a tackle shop in Amagansett, New York, has for years been throwing messages-in-bottles into the Atlantic. He usually never sees the bottles again. But on January 24 he received a package in the mail containing one of his discarded bottles which, apparently, had floated all the way to Bournemouth, England. The finder of the bottle (who knew Bennett's address from the business card in the bottle) had written this note to Bennett:

I recently found your bottle while taking a scenic walk on a beach by Poole Harbour. While you may consider this some profound experiment on the path and speed of oceanic currents, I have another name for it - litter. You Americans don't seem to be happy unless you are mucking up somewhere. If you wish to foul your own nest, all well and good. But please refrain in the future from fouling mine.

The strangeness of this reply has puzzled everyone, and even prompted the Daily Telegraph to apologize for their countryman's lack of humor. But Newsday smells something fishy with this seafaring bottle story. They don't suspect Harvey Bennett is making up a hoax, but they think someone may be playing a prank on him. They point out that the name of the humorless British correspondent, "Mr. Bigglesworth," is also the name of Dr. Evil's cat in the Austin Powers movies. In addition:

A search of public records turned up no Henry Biggelsworth in Poole or neighboring Bournemouth... On a customs label affixed to the package, the sender used a slightly different spelling - Bigglesworth - when signing his name... The sender left out the "e" in Bournemouth on the return address. There is also no street in Bournemouth called "The Bowery." And the postal code should have begun with "BH" not "BJ."

Assuming that Bennett is trustworthy, I'm guessing that one of three things could have happened: a) The bottle really did make its way to England, and the reply was meant to be tongue-in-cheek; b) The bottle was found by someone in America and shipped to England, from where it was sent back to Bennett... making this a bottle version of the traveling-gnome prank; or c) the whole thing was engineered by some of Bennett's friends as a prank on him. They put one of his business cards in a bottle and arranged for it to be sent to him from England.
Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2006.   Comments (9)

Best Blonde Joke Ever —
Status: Prank
Here it is. The best blonde joke ever.

(If you ever find out what it is, let me know)
Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2006.   Comments (23)

Rogue Paint Line —
Status: Undetermined
image What is the meaning of a two-mile line of paint that stretches through central London? No one knows who put it there or why. The BBC reports:

It begins on the pavement at a bus stop in Euston and only stops for roads, starting again on the pavement on the other side... Camden Council, Transport for London and electricity suppliers say they did not put it there. Theories include it being a drunken prank or street art.

Maybe it's a message from aliens. But seriously, how could someone paint a two-mile line of paint through a major city without anyone noticing who did it?
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006.   Comments (11)

Sami Fleshscraper —
Status: Possible prank
image Forty years after stealing a "Sami Fleshscraper" from a Norwegian museum, the contrite thief has mailed the item back. Problem is, the museum has no idea what the object is. From the article on Yahoo News:

"For 40 years I have enjoyed this rare tool in my home. In my old age ... I have now decided to return it to the descendants of those who imagined it, built it and used it," the anonymous thief wrote in a typed letter sent to the embassy just before Christmas. The letter was posted from Biarritz in southwestern France and signed by "an ex-thief who was less a thief and more a man passionate about authenticity and real life"... The repentant thief called it a "scratcher", a word he then crossed out and replaced with "Sami fleshscraper" followed by a question mark. Sami refers to the indigenous people of northern Europe, also known as Lapplanders.

This sounds to me like a prank: mail an inexplicable object to a museum, leaving them wondering what in the world it is. Maybe they'll even decide it really is a fleshscraper and place it in the museum.
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006.   Comments (14)

Russian Pranks —
Status: Pranks
Singapore's Electric New Paper has an article about the burgeoning market for pranks among Russia's nouveau riche. People there are spending tens of thousands of dollars (roubles) to pull elaborate pranks on their friends. Staging fake arrests seems to be a popular gag. There's even a company that will coordinate intricate stunts. Jokes in the company's catalog include:

The Robinson Crusoe: "For 20,000 a group of up to five friends are invited on to a yacht and shipwrecked on an island with no food or shelter."

And this one: "Invite friends to a party at an isolated Russian country house or dacha on Moscow's outskirts. After a while the host vanishes, the phone lines are cut and the guests are locked in. For an extra fee, an actor posing as an axe-wielding maniac can break in." Sure, nothing could go wrong there.
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006.   Comments (5)

The Flower Fairy —
Status: Prank
A Flower Fairy is on the loose on Anderson Island:

Last spring flower bouquets and potted plants began appearing without explanation at the homes of numerous residents of this small island southwest of Tacoma. After a summer hiatus, the practice has resumed, island Fire Chief Jim Bixler said... Residents who received the deliveries said they heard a knock and answered the door to find a floral gift with a handwritten note saying, "Hope these make you smile." Each note is signed, "Love, the Flower Fairy."

My theory: it's a local florist trying to drum up business by encouraging spontaneous flower giving. Still, it's a nice idea.
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006.   Comments (9)

Condom in a Hazelnut —
Status: Seems to be a prank
image Brian Geist was sitting at home on New Year's Eve enjoying some hazelnuts. But there was a strange surprise in one of them: a condom. As his wife reported to the Glenwood Springs Post Independent (may require registration):

"My husband cracked open a hazelnut and a condom popped out. He couldn't believe it. He just sort of sat there and stared at it and he said, 'You wouldn't believe what I found in this nut," Geist said Tuesday. She assumed he might have been talking about a bug. But it turned out to be a bright-yellow condom, still rolled up, she said.

The nuts were bought at a local Wal-Mart Supercenter. The Wal-Mart spokesperson had no clue what to make of the incident. Meanwhile, the police chief noted that he was aware of condoms being sold inside plastic walnuts, though the nut in this case wasn't plastic. The Wal-Mart spokesperson, and a pr representative for the nut company both "expressed surprise at a condom being able to fit into the relatively small shell of a hazelnut. Geist agreed it was a tight fit. She said her husband speculates that the shell had been cut in half and glued back together. Meisner [the police chief], who didn't see signs of sawing or gluing, said he doesn't doubt the Geists' story. Geist said it's not something she could have concocted if she tried. 'It's so bizarre, I'm not clever enough to make up something that crazy,' she said."

I don't suppose there's any way of getting a condom inside a hazelnut without breaking the nut open first. So if it was a prank, someone went to quite a bit of trouble to pull it off. And the Geists aren't threatening to sue, so it's hard to see what motive they would have for making up the story. (Unless they just wanted to get their name in the paper.) Very weird. Maybe a mad scientist has genetically engineered condom-growing nuts.
Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006.   Comments (17)

‘Who Wants To Die’ Talking Elmo —
Status: Either a prank or a manufacturing defect
image When Angela Bolls bought an interactive Elmo book for her young daughter, Miranda, she had no idea what she would be exposing her daughter to:

Family members said 16-month-old Miranda Boll's new book, "Potty Time With Elmo," was supposed to teach an interactive lesson using voice commands. However, when the book's buttons are pressed, it reportedly says something it is not supposed to -- "who wants to die?" ... Bolls said she checked another copy of the same book and found that it says something completely different; "Who wants to try to go potty?" The company that makes the book said it has had several complaints concerning the book, according to the report.

So I guess some prankster with a dark sense of humor has been tampering with the potty-training books. That, or the books are satanically possessed. I actually don't think the mother should be complaining too much. That book could be worth a fortune on eBay.
Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2006.   Comments (52)

The Traveling Gnome Prank —
Status: Prank
Wayne Johnston's garden gnome disappeared. Then he began receiving letters from it posted from all corners of the world. Being a police officer, Johnston launched an unofficial investigation into who was responsible for his gnome's abduction. It turned out almost all his friends were, including those who had been helping him with his investigation.

So this is another instance of the traveling gnome prank. I know that this prank was featured in the 2001 French movie Amelie. It was also further popularized by a Travelocity ad campaign about a traveling gnome. But what I'm not sure about is whether this prank was popular even before Amelie. Have people been sending gnomes around the world for decades?

I should also note that I've finally gotten around to creating a category for gnomes.
Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005.   Comments (21)

Biker Hits Pothole —
Status: Real
Everyone is linking to these photos of a biker hitting a pothole in the rain and taking a nasty spill. They were taken by Liu Tao for the Beijing Youth Daily. The thing is that Liu knew the pothole was there and, instead of telling people about it, just waited for someone to fall into it so that he could get his shot. Which kind of makes this a photo sequence of a prank in action. Beijing Youth Daily readers have apparently been outraged by the photos, writing in that Liu is "disgusting" and "should really be condemned."

image image image

Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005.   Comments (22)

School For Pranks —
Status: True (news item)
A couple of people emailed me about this. (Thanks to everyone who did!) The artist Ray Beldner has been teaching a class at St. Mary's College titled "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism." One of the class requirements is to try to hoax the media. One hoax created by the students involved "the distribution of a news release touting a fictional bar to be opened near the Moraga campus." However, the media didn't fall for it. (Evidently it wasn't sensational or salacious enough... make a story sufficiently shocking or weird and the media will usually print it first and ask questions later.) Not everyone is happy with the class. A professor of journalism ethics has charged that Beldner "is teaching students to try to screw up an important system that has enough trouble getting things right." I wouldn't agree (based on the limited quotation from the ethics professor... he may well have given a more nuanced response which isn't being reported). My understanding of the ethical rules for hoaxes is that it's wrong to make up lies that people have no reason not to believe or to take seriously (i.e. bomb threats, slander, puffing up your résumé with phony accomplishments, etc.). But it's acceptable to make up stuff if a) what you've made up is ridiculous or absurd enough that common sense would dictate people should question it before uncritically believing it, and b) the dissemination of the false information will do no harm (beyond embarrassment to those who fall for it). If you follow those rules, I think pranks and hoaxes are perfectly legitimate and can serve a useful social function.
Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2005.   Comments (5)

Smoot Retires —
Status: Update about a classic college prank
image NPR reports that Oliver Smoot has retired from the board of the American National Standards Institute. Fans of classic college pranks will recognize Smoot as the official unit of length of the Harvard Bridge. Here's what Neil Steinberg writes (in If At All Possible, Involve A Cow: The Book of College Pranks) about how the Smoot came into being:

In the fall of 1958, the pledge masters at MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha house, dreading the approaching freeze, charged their pledges with remedying the bridge situation. They gave them the task of marking off the bridge so that a person crossing could know how far it was to the other side without looking up. The unit of measurement selected by the frat elders was the body length of one of the pledges. That role, and immortality of a sort, fell to the shortest member of the pledge class, Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. One October night, Smoot, several fellow pledges and an upperclass overseer, armed themselves with white paint and headed for the bridge. There they laid Smoot end over end, painting a Smoot mark at every 5'7 interval delineated by Smoot's body. The Harvard Bridge is long, and by the end they were picking up Smoot and moving him along. The bridge measured precisely 364.4 Smoots, plus one ear.

Ever since 1958 the Smoot marks have been diligently repainted and have become a Boston landmark, their preservation embraced and encouraged by the Boston government itself. It seems kind of ironic that Smoot himself, the man who embodied a unit of length, ended up on the board of the American National Standards Institute.
Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2005.   Comments (4)

Grandma Steals Baby Jesus —
Status: True
image Virginia Voiers, a 70-year-old grandmother, has been charged with stealing baby Jesus from a nativity scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

"It was a lark, it wasn't any serious stealing,'' Voiers told the Lovely County Citizen newspaper of Eureka Springs. "My granddaughter commented that no one had taken the baby Jesus this year and said, 'Grandma?' I said, 'Oh, what the heck.''' Usually, the baby Jesus is returned by the thief. Voiers said her Saturday caper was the first time she'd taken anything from the nativity. "I didn't know we had a tattletale downtown,'' said Voiers, who is also a Sunday school teacher at a Methodist church.

She got caught because a security camera had been installed to catch pranksters in the act. In other words, the entire theft was filmed. I'd love to see that video.
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2005.   Comments (13)

Why did the gnomes cross the road? —
Status: Prank
Eighteen garden gnomes were found lined up in the Australian town of Warrnambool, waiting to cross a road. The police stated:

"Right on the crossing, there was some on one side and some on the other side patiently waiting for the traffic to stop," he said. "At this stage we believe it's just a school prank but obviously the owners of the garden gnomes wouldn't appreciate their property being stolen from their gardens. They're just gn-one (gone)."

The gnomes were taken to the police station where they were given a cup of tea. However, the police were unable to fingerprint them. (One of these days I really need to create a separate category just for gnome stories.)
Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005.   Comments (10)

Skype Prank — Here's a prank perpetrated on the Skype system (an internet-based phone and chat service) that proves you never know who you're talking to online:

A profile is put up with a girl's name and picture, and put in "Skype me" mode. Within minutes some seedy guy will invariably try calling/chatting, and there's a little program I made running the whole time which will partner up people 2 at a time, and send messages from the first person to the second, & vice versa. This way both people think they're talking to a girl, when they find out, well, they're not normally too happy about it...

It reminds me of the VixenLove program (which was a computer program designed to simulate a 19-year-old girl). But this is better, because it pairs up two real people and makes them waste their time hitting on each other.
Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2005.   Comments (10)

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