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.”

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.

The man who took the most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster confessed to it being a hoax when arrested by the police.

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.

Since 1957, BBC have been playing April Fool Pranks on their viewers. Their last hoax in 2010, was claiming that they had proof Shakespeare was German.

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'

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.

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.

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.

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.