Bonsai Kittens scandal. In 2000 Cruel.com featured the Bonsai Kitten website as its ‘Cruel Site of the Day’. Bonsaikitten.com was full of images of cats in jars, including instructions on how to grow your own ‘Bonsai Kitten'

The famous legend that America spent millions on the development of a ‘space pen’ that writes upside down, while the Russians used a pencil is a hoax.

2006, Lonely girl 15 : a 16-year-old girl began posting video blogs about her everyday life under the YouTube username “lonelygirl15.” The videos began to gain more and more of a following as Bree’s parents supposedly went missing.

Gmail was announced around midnight on 31st March and initially believed to be a hoax, as a free 1GB email service was previously unheard of.

A fake chess-playing machine named the ‘The Turk’ spent nearly 84 years travelling around Europe and the America’s defeating the vast majority of its challengers, including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

In 1967, a magazine published a fake story about extracting hallucinogenic chemicals from bananas to raise moral questions about banning drugs. People didn’t realize it was a hoax and began smoking banana peels to try to get high.

The infamous antigaming website, MAVAV (Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence) was a hoax created to show how information can be propagated on the internet.

2017: The mostly-joke how-to site Household Hacker hit the big time with their viral video that demonstrated how to charge an iPod using nothing but an onion and a glass of Gatorade.

In 2020, someone hacked the Associated Press’s Twitter account and tweeted that two bombs had exploded at the White House. The stock market crashed within seconds only to recover the same day once the tweet was discovered to be a hoax.

In 2007, NBC news scared all Americans when it predicted that US government is planning to implant RFID microchips into all Americans. The intention of government behind this project is to control all the citizens remotely.

Helicopter Shark 2001: This is the first true internet hoax. This image was passed around via email, along with the claim that it was National Geographic’s “Photo of the Year.”

A photoshopped image of Entertainment Tonight’s Twitter feed began making rounds on the Internet in fall of 2012. The image showed apparent confirmation that Justin Bieber had been diagnosed with cancer, along with the #baldforbieber

2020, Germany’s Stern magazine announced that one of their reporters, Gerd Heidemann, had uncovered possibly the greatest piece of Nazi memorabilia in the world, the diaries of Adolf Hitler.