Eastenders Axed? No, just a new Internet prank.

There are whispers online that popular UK soap opera Eastenders is to finish after 29 years on British television screens.

The rumours are not true though, so those Eastenders fans need not worry.

The rumour comes courtesy of a type of trending prank that we fear we will be seeing a lot of this year. The prank allows any user to submit their very own prank story, simply by submitting an image, title and brief description to the prank website (in this instance hosted at shortme.us) which then creates a “social-media-savvy” link for the prankster to share on social media websites.

Whilst many user submitted prank stories will be more believable than others, we imagine the stories that walk the fine line of plausibility will be the more popular pranks. The site even provides a visitor-count so the prankster can see how many people that they have “trolled”. The Eastenders prank – at the time of writing – accumulating well over 1.5 million hits.

It works in a similar fashion to the popular celebrity death hoax site FakeAWish.com that allows visitors to enter the name of a celebrity, the site then creates a fake news article reporting the “death” of that chosen celebrity for the visitor to share on Facebook.

So, this is even more reason to make sure that your “news” is really news, and thus is on legitimate media outlets, not just on obscure, unfamiliar websites. Remember, always confirm the veracity of a story before sharing it with your friends.

Have a worried Eastenders fan on your hands? Make sure you send them this link – and remember to stay on top of Internet hoaxes by following our Facebook and Twitter Pages.