A bizarre series of articles claiming that a number of people have been either killed or wounded after a “dispute between terrorists” are spreading online. The articles attribute the deaths and injuries to terrorist organisation ISIS.
Many different instances of these headlines are appearing online, all publishing the same “news story” but with different town and city names included in the articles. The town and city names appears to be the only difference between these different headlines and articles popping up all over the Internet.
All the headlines claim “7 dead, 11 wounded by ISIS in [insert town name]”
However none of the headlines are discussing a genuine news story. The story has been entirely made up, and is not true for any of the locations mentioned in the headlines.
Some examples include –
7 dead, 11 wounded by ISIS in Birmingham
7 dead, 11 wounded by ISIS in Huntsville
7 dead, 11 wounded by ISIS in Geelong
7 dead, 11 wounded by ISIS in Oakland
Other locations included in the fake headlines include Sheffield, Belfast and Geraldton.
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This isn’t the first time these sort of links have spread online. We first reported about it in 2015 when another series of different headlines using a very similar story went viral.
Many of the websites forward to more suspicious websites that rely heavily on advertising and spammy pop-ups that could potentially lead to an attempted malware attack, so we recommend not clicking on these sorts of headlines and always remember to get your news from reputable media outlets.
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