The Viagra Oyster Email Hoax

George May had a clever idea: Let oysters soak in a solution of Viagra for a while, and then sell them as Viagra Oysters. Of course, Pfizer is objecting to this use of its drug, and food-safety officials don't like the idea of selling purposefully contaminated oysters. But still, May is confident he's got a successful product on his hands, and his idea has received quite a lot of media attention. So it pleased him, but didn't surprise him, when he received the following email from Google's corporate offices:
"Congratulations! The Viagra oyster story is the fastest growing internet story since 9/11 with over 700,000 links in 24 hours."
Except, of course, Google doesn't send out congratulatory letters of this kind. If they did, they'd constantly be congratulating whoever was the latest internet-celebrity-of-the-day. The email was the work of a prankster who forged the "from" field. Or was it? Perhaps May cooked up the email himself to gain a little more media attention for himself. He's denying this allegation, but it seems plausible to me since he's the one benefitting from the hoax -- and because his first reaction on receiving the email was to call the media and tell them about it.

Email Hoaxes

Posted on Thu Jun 07, 2007



Comments

That doesn't sound real appetizing...
Posted by Josh  on  Fri Jun 08, 2007  at  06:07 PM
I read about this and it is interesting!~
Posted by BlogMack  on  Fri Feb 01, 2008  at  10:36 PM
Interesting topic. Thanks for posting
Posted by Kal  on  Sun Feb 17, 2008  at  09:58 AM
Not unpleasant. Author, write more!
Posted by Andrew  on  Fri Aug 15, 2008  at  02:19 AM
cool.Thanks.....
Posted by ilen  on  Wed Oct 29, 2008  at  04:06 AM
I order my stuff from tabletscheap*org real fast shipping and real cheap rates

try it yourself
Posted by Tolik  on  Thu Jan 21, 2010  at  05:32 AM
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