9 Fake Photos That Many Internet Users Have Believed

The number of photos and videos posted on various social networks is increasing – some are so impressive that they cause impact and repercussion, becoming “viral” and being shared by millions of users. However, cases of malicious and fraudulent manipulation of these media are also increasingly common, often so well done that we do not even suspect or notice.

O awesome.club You know that we can’t always understand the “cat jump” in certain situations, especially when it’s very easy to be deceived by someone in bad faith. Therefore, below we present 9 cases in which popular images on the net were unmasked as fake, and we tell you the real story behind each of them. Come with us on this journey!

This photo collage illustrating a campaign by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) gained fame thanks to the popular #10YearChallenge. The photo is stunning and true, but it’s actually not a montage of two photos taken 10 years apart, it’s a single photo from an image bank illustrating the destruction of the Malaysian rainforest for the expansion of oil palm plantations.

Most people can believe that the photographer actually captured the exact moment the boy was stirring a huge pan of fried rice. In fact, it’s a prank by YouTuber Kanta to trick a friend into using a fried rice sculpture that can be found in a Tokyo store specializing in fake food and dishes, made to decorate restaurant windows.

This photo became a fever on many websites and social platforms, even though it was an image obviously worked with Photoshop. The mural, made in 2015, is located on a wall of a building located in the Lithuanian city of Marijampolé. The author of the work is also Lithuanian artist Ray Bartkus, a master of street art, who painted the drawings backwards on purpose so that the image would reflect in the water in the correct orientation. But the design is only seen more clearly when the surface of the river is absolutely smooth – a very rare situation to occur. Most of the time, the reflection is seen as in the photo below:

Comparing the two images, it’s immediately noticeable that the reflection from the first photo was processed via Photoshop to look sharper.

“Some people found, in a company, a baby lynx and a baby deer that were hiding under the table, escaping from the wildfires in California.” It was with this description that this photo became famous on several social platforms, such as Reddit, Pikabu, twitter, among others. The photo is real, but it resurfaces every time there are wildfires somewhere in the United States. The photo was originally taken in May 2009 by a member of an animal rescue NGO. The lynx cub had been found a few days earlier. As the fire progressed, there was no more space to properly store new rescued animals, so when the baby deer was rescued, it was placed where the baby lynx was already, and immediately the baby lynx lay down next to it, doing so. a “cupcake” of cuteness.

Later, one of the rescue team members took the animals home, as he feared they would not survive in the wild. Subsequently, he even shared a video with the lynx already grown and super docile.

This photo supposedly shows Paris on New Year’s Eve, with the Eiffel Tower surrounded by hundreds of fireworks. It is not very difficult to come to the conclusion that this is just another case of an image “mounted” in Photoshop, and here are some facts: firstly, on New Year’s Eve the New Year’s Eve fireworks show traditionally takes place at the Arc de Triomphe, not at the Eiffel Tower; second, all the fireworks are located in the same foreground, a strong indication of image manipulation, as there is no depth or perspective showing lights at different distances. Finally, a lot of Reddit users (residents or just visitors to Paris) claim that the photo is fabricated. By way of comparison, see below how the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower look like in the celebrations of July 14, the National Day of France:

Another case that generated hundreds of thousands of shares: the photo of a goose sheltering and warming a puppy under its wings during a winter storm in Montana, USA. The fact is that it is not possible to verify the veracity of the story told: after some research, information emerges that this image was taken a long time ago, and perhaps not even in the United States — such an image went viral on Chinese websites and social platforms in the middle of 2017. But it wouldn’t be a surprise to see this kind of animal interaction: in Turkey a pelican named Osman became a “local celebrity” after befriending a puppy, as you can see below:

In 2013, the video went viral on the internet of a worker who crushes, with a huge excavator, a car that supposedly belongs to his boss, in a kind of revenge for the fact that he is behind on his salary – at least that’s what the title of the magazine said. publication in question. As might be expected, none of this is true. The car was dented during an advertising campaign for the insurance company Allianz24 in Switzerland. There’s even a video on YouTube about the preparations to shoot this video. A curious fact: the engine and liquids were removed from the car before it was crushed.

The fossils of a megalodon tooth and a whale vertebra in the photo above are real, only they were found in different places and at different times. All it took was a clever salesman to skillfully combine them into just one sculpture, and voilà!, there we have a decoy. Even the owner of the artifact is well aware of this — if it really were a megalodon tooth genuinely trapped in a whale vertebra, then such a find would be invaluable to paleontology, and would most likely be in some archaeological museum.

In fact, the photo has been shared on the internet since 2012, and at one point the “archaeological find” could even be purchased for as little as $125.

The caption of this image posted on Facebook says that this boat dumps human waste directly into the open sea. When the message went viral and users began to write indignant comments, officials intervened and explained that the image shows the moment when the cruise ship starts the engines of its turbines to dock further on. And the brown patches are sand and silt that rose from the sea floor.

What viral photo did you discover was fake? Share with us in the comments and give your opinion about the photos in our post!