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Man who called himself Phuc Dat Bich admits name was a hoax

Facebook name hoax

He told the Guardian in Australia this week that his actual name is Tin Le and that he is 23 — though the Guardian said he declined to verify that information — and that he perpetrated the hoax for fun and to show that people should be free to post whatever name they want on Facebook.

Mr. Le, if Mr. Le he be, orchestrated his now-alleged-to-be-fake story upon Facebook in January though it wasn’t picked up by media until this month. In it he posted his (alleged) passport with his photo — if it really is (ho-hum) him — and the name Phuc Dat Bich. The story made the rounds over much of the world.

The posting said he had been fighting Facebook to keep his name up and that it had been taken down numerous times and his Vietnamese cultural origins were not being appropriately treated. He said he’d been accused of “using a false and misleading name.”

Phuc Dat Name

But while plenty of media printed the Phuc Dat Bich story without verifying if the passport was real or looking further into who he was, the Guardian reported that not everyone was fooled. The name — rather a mean one, no? — and the fake passport created questions for at least one observer.

“Suspicions were aroused by technology publisher and journalist Trevor Long,” Guardian reporters Amanda Meade and Elle Hunt wrote. “Who wrote this prescient post on his website EFTM examining the evidence and concluding it was probably fake.”

From there the story unravelled and Le posted his reasons for the hoax under the name Joe Carr (joker?). He said it “started as a prank between friends” and grew from there. The episode has left him with even less respect for the media but he said he was “very grateful to those who have been supportive of certain names that populate in different cultures.”

“Out of this ordeal I’ve concluded not to trust the credibility of the media, it’s twisted by the hungry journalists who mask the truth,” he added. “It goes to show that an average Joe like myself can con the biggest news sources with ease.”

He says that he’s grown tired of the whole thing and is ready to put Phuc Dat Bich to bed. Incidentally, since this story has broken multiple Facebook pages have appeared with the name Phuc Dat Bich.

Which, it seems, is not really a name anywhere anyhow.

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