In less than a week, Nintendo’s new mobile game Pokemon Go has become a 2016 pop-culture phenomenon. (It is, you see, pretty much the only recent news item that isn’t wildly depressing.) With all the hype, think-pieces, newsjacking, and Facebook-sharing, some skepticism was lost in the shuffle.
“The Man Behind the Pokemon Crime Wave”
by Ben Collins and Kate Briquelet
The Daily Beast
July 11, 2016
America is going crazy for the new game””crazy enough to kill, if you believe all the stories on Facebook. But the bloodbath is fake, and The Daily Beast tracked down the man behind it.
At CartelPress.com, the death toll from the first weekend of Pokémon GO is still piling up.
If you”™re to believe that website, the new augmented reality game that has users walking into public parks and streets to catch Pokémon””and is nearing as many daily active users as Twitter””is responsible for a bloodbath. A teen killed his brother over a low-rent Pokémon called a Pidgey, the site reports. Countless were left dead on a Massachusetts highway when a 26-year-old stopped in the middle of the road to catch a Pikachu, it also alleges. And now, on CartelPress.com, the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS is claiming credit for the biggest Pokémon tragedy of all: rampant server issues.
Unbelievable.
No, really. It should be unbelievable. But 10,000 people shared that first story on Facebook. More than 64,000 shared the last one. And the Pokémon highway accident? Three hundred eighty-four thousand shares on Facebook in a couple of days.
And none of them are real.
CartelPress is just one part of the Pokésteria.
Now gamers on other sites are fooling people into donating to a Texas-based Uber driver who claims he witnessed a murder scene while trawling for Pokémon over the weekend””even though that murder scene, just like the rest of these stories, never existed.
That didn”™t stop plenty of reputable news agencies from recycling the Satanic Panic-esque stories that were always too good to be true. The Atlantic referenced the highway death in the middle of its story “The Tragedy of Pokémon GO.” The New York Post did the same.
There are plenty more. Pablo Reyes almost caught “™em all. According to the 26-year-old internet prankster””who flooded America”™s elevators and drive time radio shows with fake Pokécrime he invented on CartelPress, a new site he created””it”™s all one big coding mistake. Read on for the interview.