16 Comments Add your own

• 1. joe  |  February 26th, 2008 at 11:52 am

  complete with anchors in the masthead! looks a little like those old IB designs, with the weather module and the yellow navigation strip.

• 2. Mike Escutia  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

  It *does* look like the old-style IB designs. Which, by the way, are still around on the sites for Cox-owned stations (see wsbtv.com for an example).

• 3. tdc  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

  i would never fall for such a scam…

  there’s no helicopter buzzing mount rushmore.

• 4. Michael  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:37 pm

  This reminds me of another fake news site. It turned out to be a college student’s project and he continued to run it like a real news site.

  The only problem was that he was using real TV personalities’ pictures with fake identities.

  The corporate overlords were not impressed.

  [click my name to see the fake site]

• 5. Safran  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:50 pm

  At least it’s clean…

• 6. tdc  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:58 pm

  very true.

  another dead giveaway that it’s a tv fake.

• 7. CBS3Philly  |  February 26th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

  Anyone remember KRAP4.com? One of the best fake station sites ever.

• 8. Jeffmister  |  February 26th, 2008 at 1:42 pm

  That picture of the news team is actually the Perth team of National Nine News in Australia!

• 9. Amanda E.  |  February 26th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

  Looking at the source code, they took WXAN’s site for a template - including outright hot linking of images. Click my name to see.

  Its a shame this person didn’t register his domain with GoDaddy to go along with the hosting service (they used Network Solutions) - WXAN could have forced GoDaddy to give up the person’s name and contact information since this person is using the stations image for his scam (GoDaddy’s “private registration” can be blown just by a letter from a lawyer).

• 10. George  |  February 26th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  This week, articles from the “American Chronicle” started appearing daily in the google news local (Los Angeles) section. The “American Chronicle” features articles on selecting a lawyer when you’ve been in an accident. You guessed it, a law firm is running the “American Chronicle” with just enough third party news articles to game the google algorithm into thinking its news, not advertising. It does have news content, so it IS a news site. Down the slippery slope we go.

• 11. Steve Morman  |  February 26th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

  Viewing the page source shows that they actually did copy the HTML from an existing IB v2.0 site: there are many calls to IB network functions on this page that don’t exist on the web server of the fake site.

  I can even tell which site they lifted and rebranded. Too weird.

• 12. Randy  |  February 26th, 2008 at 6:10 pm

  Obvious fake, no real site would allow a home page to not have ads above the.

• 13. Jeff  |  February 26th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

  Here’s another report on the website:

• 14. Nate  |  February 28th, 2008 at 3:20 am

  I’m surprised the woman in the WAGT report didn’t check out if the station had a Wikipedia article. For every station that exists it comes up as the 2nd-5th search result in Google or Yahoo if you search under call letters. I know as a editor on the television stations project we’ve had quite a few hoaxes created by fantasy television station owners/newsgeeks that have had to been sorted out. I posted a link to this post in the talk area of the television stations project just in case these guys try to make their scam appear even more legit.

• 15. William Hughes  |  March 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 pm

  The crazy thing about the TV station is that the call letters are assigned to a radio station in Tuscaloosa, AL. I’ve been discussing these scam artists on another web site, but for the life of me, couldn’t figure out where the news team photos came from until now. I took a quick look at the National Nine Perth News team and Jeffmister is absolutely correct. I was completely lost on that one.

  By the way, it’s not the first time they got caught using another station’s call letters. They previously set up a site using the call letters WRWD in Dayton, OH. The only problem was the call letters are assigned to a country-western radio station in the Lower Hudson Valley region of New York (south of Albany, north of New York City’s northern suburbs.)

• 16. Steve  |  May 1st, 2008 at 6:54 pm

  I remember KRAP4.com…complete with Super Duper Doppler 40000, the radar so powerful it could see you showering! Great web site. It went bye-bye a few years ago, tho.

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