Internet Hoaxes

Prankster trolled thousands with fake Nostradamus prediction trick

Did Pablo Reyes really predict the future?

In December 2015, a Facebook user named Pablo Reyes wrote a disturbing Facebook post about what he thought would happen in 2016, and it had many Facebook users utterly baffled and shocked.

This is what he wrote –

Call me crazy but in 2016 Hillary Clinton will be the first female president, the world will go crazy over the death of a gorilla, Prince will die, Muhammad Ali will die, Kimbo Slice will die, Donald Trump will die. The USA will experience the worst mass shooting .. I’m not trying to scare anyone, but you’ll remember my name.

Given that the post was written before 2016 started, you can see why his post went super viral. It contains many prophecies that did indeed come true, and others that haven’t come true… but of course 2016 is not yet over.

Yes, Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president. Prince, Muhammad Ali and Kimbo Slice have all died. The world did “go crazy” over the death of a gorilla and America (perhaps less surprisingly) did see a number of terrible mass shootings, notably the shooting in a gay nightclub in Florida.


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So what’s left? Clinton isn’t the president just yet, but if Donald Trump dies before the election, that would practically make her a shoe-in. So is that what we can expect for the rest of 2016?

Perhaps not, because as you may have guessed – and since us at ThatsNonsense.com are writing about it – not is all as it seems.

Despite the spookily accurate predictions made by Pablo Reyes, as it turns out, he didn’t write the post in December 2015, he wrote it in June 2016, weeks and months after all the atrocities and events he “predicts”.

But how?

It’s easy. Not only can you – for some reason – back date posts on Facebook (this means you write a post and click the Clock icon and select a date in the past to make it appear it was posted then) you can also simply just edit older posts and completely rewrite them to say something completely different.

You can tell if a post is backdated because it has a little clock icon next to it declaring when it was “added”. Also if a post has been edited, a link appears underneath he username that directs to the edit history that contains previous versions of the post.

But not a lot of people will go looking for either, making Reyes’ post appear to the majority as a genuinely creepy Nostradamus-like prediction.

This isn’t the first time Reyes has fooled thousands. He is the owner of fauxtire “entertainment” websites Huzlers.com and CartelPress.com that print fake news in order to fool gullible people into sharing them. Sites which presumably rack up some pretty impressive advertising revenue for him.

Be sceptical out there people.

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Published by
Craig Haley