At least 17 blog pages all pretending to be the official website of GMA News published similar reports from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4 about a rider who allegedly delivered a severed head. They are hoaxes.
The thumbnail of the video embedded in all of the circulating posts shows a manipulated screen grab of an Oct. 20 report from GMA’s primetime newscast 24 Oras. It was about fake orders booked by an unidentified customer, victimizing several food delivery riders in Las Piñas City and costing them around P20,000.
The report did not say anything about the delivery or discovery of a severed head.
The original news ticker in the 24 Oras report was replaced with the following text: “Delivery rider, hindi inakalang pugot na ulo ang naideliver. Suspek, pinaghahanap na ng pulisya (Delivery rider did not expect to turn over a severed head. Police now looking for the suspect).”
The 17 impostor websites dubiously bore similar names. VERA Files Fact Check’s analysis of the sites showed that 10 are managed by one account named “GMA News TV Blog” on the blog-publishing service Blogger. The account was created just this month.
The other seven are managed by another Blogger account under the name “GMA News,” created last month. All 17 blog pages only carried one piece of content: the severed head hoax.
All the posts carried an embedded video, but when clicked, redirects netizens to a new website with the URL gmatvn3twork.xyz, another site pretending to be GMA News.
The new site’s page display is similar to that of web pages that peddled death hoaxes in the past that were flagged by VERA Files. Notable red flags were:
- a layout mimicking a Facebook (FB) post;
- a text-only name of the publisher, in this case 24 Oras, that does not link to an official account;
- a “LIVE” logo edited only into an embedded video, falsely suggesting that it is a livestream;
- a “1 hr ago” timestamp that does not change despite the passage of time;
- an unchanging number of post interactions that is just text and does not reflect actual engagements of the report; and
- a web page filled with advertisements that occupy more space than the report itself, which suggests money is a driver for the creation of these hoaxes.
The domain gmatvn3twork.xyz was registered as a website just last Dec. 2, according to the domain database Whois. Visiting its homepage only redirects to Yahoo Philippines’ official website.
The erroneous reports came two weeks after riders of mobile food delivery service Foodpanda held a motorcade protest and went to the Department of Labor and Employment office in Intramuros, Manila, to forward their grievances about the new payment scheme being employed by the company as basis of the riders’ pay.
Included in their concerns are complaints about fake bookings, which take a toll on their earnings as they end up paying for the fee of the bogus orders and deliveries.
A report on the e-commerce economy in Southeast Asia, published last Nov. 10 by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, showed that there had been a “spike in food deliveries” in six Southeast Asian countries — Philippines included — after lockdowns were imposed. This demand, however, decreased after quarantine restrictions were eased.
FB’s monitoring tool was able to detect two posts carrying links to the fake reports. One was viewed 6,800 times, while the other was viewed 10,800 times by FB users.
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)