REPORTS OF HIS ‘DEATHS’ ARE GREATLY AGGREGATED
Pranksters ‘kill off’ same guy all over Web
He’s dead to them — and everyone else!
A group of friends is taking bizarre revenge on a former pal who they say owes them money — by sending his picture to news outlets and claiming he died in several recent terror attacks and other tragedies.
A photo of the unnamed man, who lives in Mexico, has so far been featured in news stories about victims of the Orlando shooting, the Istanbul airport bombing and the EgyptAir crash, according to a France24 report.
A snap of the man’s face pops up in a New York Times video about the Orlando shooting, as well as in a BBC article and several social-media threads about terror victims, the site reported.
“#Help my brother Alfonso was on #Atatürk Airport and we don’t know anything about him, help please #Turkey,” @marty_batiato tweeted, along with the man’s photo, after the bombing.
But it’s all just part of a sick prank by former pals in Mexico — who claim the “dead” man is a deadbeat who scammed them out of dough, according to the site.
When they weren’t paid back. “we decided to punish him by posting his photo online,” one of the pranksters told the site.
“Our goal is to ruin his reputation,” he added. “We want the whole world to recognize his face.”
He and other aggrieved parties created fake social-media posts because the now-infamous man swiped more than $1,000 from them, the prankster explained.
The very alive man is now furious that people think he’s been killed, several times over.
“My photo is everywhere be- cause of someone who started it as a prank after a legal dispute,” the man told the site.
The unnamed man’s face also appears in connection with other tragic events, including a shooting in Mexico City.
He contacted the BBC and The New York Times and asked them to delete his photo — but they didn’t respond, he said.
But he hasn’t taken legal action to remove his photo from news reports because in Mexico, “nothing ever happens in these kind of cases,” he said.