A story claiming Mexican drug czar Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has declared war on ISIS because jihadists destroyed a drug shipment is a hoax, but numerous news sites still picked up the report and ran with it, reportedly including Fox News and the New York Post.
The fake story was even the top trending news item on the Bing search site on Friday morning.
The story first appeared on Monday on the
CartelBlog.com, saying the Islamic State ran afoul of the Sinaloa Cartel by destroying drug shipments meant for Middle Eastern countries and to be purchase by "the growing nightlife scene" there.
The blog claimed that Guzman, who is on the run after escaping from a Mexican prison, sent an angry email to ISIS which was leaked.
"You (ISIS) are not soldiers. You are nothing but lowly p******," Guzman was supposed tohave written to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. "Your god cannot save you from the true terror that my men will levy at you if you continue to impact my operation."
"My men will destroy you. The world is not yours to dictate. I pity the next son of a w**** that tries to interfere with the business of the Sinaloa Cartel. I will have their heart and tongue torn from them."
Steve Charnock, a satirist working for Thug Life Videos, told the
Daily Mail he was the author of the story that was posted on Nov. 30. Charnock said the story and his other work are comedy pieces never meant to be treated as real stories.
Charnock said his boss came up with the idea of gang members like the Bloods and Crips tangling with terrorists. He said none of the mainstream news sites contacted him to clarify the information.
"It was satire, faux news," said Charnock. "It got a few shares on Facebook initially, but now it is the top story on some websites."
Snopes.com reported the New York Post, Forbes and Fox News were just some of the news outlets that picked up the fake story.
Some sites, like the
Latin Correspondent, appeared to doubt the story from the start.
"The comunicado, which circulated on YouTube and various blogs (and has also been variously attributed to the Zetas), may have been the inspiration for what appears to be a satirical (or at least, unsubstantiated) report claiming that Sinaloa boss Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán sent an encrypted email to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS," wrote the Latin Correspondent.
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