Is President Macron removing the Christmas bonus for recipients of the "CAF" ("Caisse des Allocations Familiales")? No, that's not true: no official announcement about this has been made but a post on a prank website has gone massively viral in the past few days.
The story originated from an article published on actualitesdujour.fr probably somewhere in early or mid November 2018 titled "Prime de Noël supprimé" (archived here) which opened:
Macron continue les réformes .la prime de Noël dont bénéficie les allocataire de la CAF sera supprimé des cette année Après les APL ça continue et ce n'est que le début .
The reason the date is unclear is that the site uses fake publication dates that always show today's date.
Translation:
Macron continues the reforms. The Christmas bonus for CAF recipients will be removed this year After the APL continues and this is just the beginning.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Prime de Noël supprimé
Macron continue les réformes .la prime de Noël dont bénéficie les allocataire de la CAF sera supprimé des cette année Après les APL ça continue et ce n'est que le début .
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 actualitesdujour.fr before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
