Did Craig Jenkins just ink a three million dollar deal with Comedy Central? No, that's not true: some joker uploaded a fake story about it to a prank website but it is not real.
The story originated from an article published on the website Trend News on August 31, 2018 titled "Local comedian lands deal with Comedy Central" (archived here) which opened:
Local Comedian Craig Jenkins just inked a deal with Comdey Central that will pay him an estimated 3 million dollars over the next two years. A spokesman for Comedy Central stated that Jenkins had been on their radar for some time now as a possible successor to Dave Chapelle. Jenkins and Comedy Central will begin filming in the Fall of this year.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail, giving the impression it was a real news article:
Local comedian lands deal with Comedy Central
Local Comedian Craig Jenkins just inked a deal with Comdey Central that will pay him an estimated 3 million dollars over the next two years. A spokesman for Comedy Central stated that Jenkins had been on their radar for some time now as a possible successor to Dave Chapelle. Jenkins and Comedy Central will begin filming in the Fall of this year.
The site that published the story is a prank website where users can submit their own headline, description and photo to create realistic looking prank news articles.
Users don't even need to upload their own image, there is a built-in search function that will pull an appropriate image from Google image search.
The site is part of a larger network of prank sites all using the same basic layout but sometimes in different languages. It appears to be run by a Belgian company named Mediavibes or Media Vibes which is managed by a man named Nicolas Gouriou according to registration records.
Each site in the network comes with a disclaimer (sometimes translated into a different language) that reads:
This website is an entertainment website, jokes are created by users. These are humourous jokes, fantasy, fictional, that should not be seriously taken or as a source of information.
So don't fall for this prank now that we've warned you about it!
We wrote about trend-news.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
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