Phuc Dat Bich was a fake. (Insert play-on-words joke here)

The Facebook user known as “Phuc Dat Bich” who spent most of last week – or indeed this year – complaining that Facebook were continually removing his account under the belief he was using a fake name has turned out to be a hoaxer.

So… to clarify that, Phuc Dat Bich doesn’t exist. Ergo, he hasn’t had a struggle with Facebook over his name. It was all a joke.

The man behind the fictional name managed to hoodwink no shortage of news outlets, including the usually harder to fool BBC. Dozens of mainstream media outlets reported on “Mr. Bich’s” struggle to have Facebook accept his name and stop deleting or deactivating his Facebook account.

But Mr. Bich’s real name, apparently, is Tin Le. And his struggle with Facebook was all a joke, and the photo of his passport (above) which he used to try and convince the media and Facebook of the legitimacy of his name was digitally altered.

Le confessed in a revealing Facebook post that what started as a joke between friends spiralled into a conscious effort to fool media outlets who he described as “hungry journalists who mask the truth”. Or in this case, journalists who took a man at his word without verifying his identity.

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But Le was also trying to highlight to Facebook that it is – in his words – “utterly impossible to legitimise a place where there will always be pranksters and tricksters”. Perhaps.

As shocking as it is for us to see a lie on the Internet of all places [/sarcasm] it will hopefully provide sufficient embarrassment for those media outlets who reported on the original story to implement a more effective process to snuff out fake stories in the future.

And watch out for a handful of Facebook Pages that have sprung up since the stories broke who are attempting to exploit the story’s popularity. These are likely like-farming pages just looking for followers.