13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers….Not

An interesting debate is emerging over this article from Money.co.uk which alleges that a 13 year old stole his fathers credit card to buy hookers. The catch is that it was completely made up, but it resulted in 1500 inbound links and (even more fancifully) got picked up by several mainstream media sites.

SEL discusses the possibility that Google may penalize the site for the fake story; the obvious question is what in the world is Google doing micromanaging listing to this extent, but the evidence would suggest that this might be the case.

On one hand you have to give credit to the site owner for creativity, but it’s not really a long term strategy for success, no matter what the short term gain. People can always smell a rat…and so apparently can Google.