Rumours are circulating across the Internet that popular graffiti artist Banksy was arrested and revealed to be a 35 year old man known as Paul Horner.
The reports claim that the “24-hour Anti-Graffiti Task Force” arrested the artist when monitoring areas he frequented. This in turn led to his studio getting raided and his identity and mugshot being revealed.
However the story is a complete fabrication published by – not so surprisingly – the National Report.net, a popular fake news website which continually publishes nonsense under the guise of satire – or fauxtire as we dub it (satire with no obvious attempt at humour, but rather an emphasis on luring people to their website with ‘clickbaity’ headlines)
Whilst we do not know who the man pictured in the National Report (photo below) is, it is unlikely that it shows Banksy. (Edit: It’s Paul Horner, the author of the article.)
The National Report.net has recently been responsible for publishing a false story that a family of 5 Texans contracting the Ebola virus, as well as nonsense stories about the US government secretly placing RFID tracking chips into citizens and a police officer who murdered a mother for breastfeeding her baby.
Thus nothing the website says should be taken seriously. To put matters to bed, Banksy’s PR agent confirmed on Twitter that the story was nothing more than a hoax.
Many stories have surfaced online claiming to reveal Banksy’s true identity, the most popular claiming his real name is Robin Gunningham, pictured below.
The advice, as always, is to never share information from National Report.net or the plethora of other similar fake news “fauxtire” websites. They publish these stories to mislead people and to make money from the ads on their websites.
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