Avi Ben Stella, Hayden Wybron Internet Hoaxes

Posted by Thomas Alan Gray Aug 27, 2009

According to urban legends site snopes.com, this has been floating around since mid-August of 2009.

“PRAYERS NEEDED for 12yr old Avi Ben Stella who, after a serious car crash, is now in a critical coma. Pls. change your status for 1 hr so more people can become aware and add to the prayers. We would do it for your son, pls. do this for somebody else's son.”

Where earlier "poor kid" hoaxes have circulated largely by email, the Avi ben Stella apparently made a big splash on social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. 'Avi Ben Stella" was one of the most-searched terms on google for the first half of August, but by today it has disappeared from the top 100.

Examiner.com reports that threads on the name Avi Ben Stella eventually lead, via a New York Post story on the death of 12 year old Avi Amenov, to "a page which tries to load malware on your computer. This seems like the most likely explanation of the story's origin."

Snopes identifies the Avi ben Stella story as a hoax, along with a clone using the name Hayden Wybron.

Moral of the story: Don't believe most of what you find spamming your in-box, and distrust Twitter. Check with reliable sources. Don't forward the crap.

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I was playing with copyscape last night, and was perversely pleased to find one of my articles about Not-so-Useless Inventions pasted into a forum post in a yahoo answers thread. Other suite101 writers have been reporting widespread plagiarism, so I was starting to feel rejected, as though my material weren't worth stealing.

So I sent off a complaint to yahoo, posted an appropriate comment, and wondered what would happen. The offending post was deleted within 12 hours.