Did a man from Canton, Ohio (or any other place) kill his wife's lover and then cook and serve the man's penis to her for dinner? No, that's not true: a fake website pretending to be CBS News published the story but it is not real. The fake site is part of a network of sites that have been publishing fake stories for years, often repeating the same ones but with names and locations changed.
The story appeared in an article published on "cbsnews24.com" (not the real CBS News) on December 3, 2018 titled "Canton, OH: Man killed his wife's lover and later cooked and served his penis for her dinner" (archived here) which opened:
A shocking crime has left officials in Canton, Ohio stunned after a 43-year old man was charged with the murder and mutilation of another local man.
What made the crime so horrific is what took place after the alleged murder. According to reports, the suspect discovered his wife was having an affair with a local man who she'd met at her gym.
Enraged, the man followed his wife's lover home and allegedly killed him before brutally torturing him. Investigators believe that the man was not content to let his wife go unpunished, and he set about on a gruesome revenge.
"We found the victim's body had his penis removed, and when we investigated further his wife told us about an unusual dinner that her husband had served her," said one law enforcement officer. "We later discovered that he'd taken the penis home and cooked it up before serving it to his wife."
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail and they may have confused it with a real CBS News story:
Canton, OH: Man killed his wife's lover and later cooked and served his penis for her dinner
A shocking crime has left officials in Canton, Ohio stunned after a 43-year old man was charged with the murder and mutilation of another local man.What made the crime so horrific is what took place after the alleged murder. According to reports, the
The screenshot that accompanied the article is actually from ABC News (not CBS) and it comes from a 2016 video about a (different) murder not involving penis removal or cooking:
NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalist to rank the reliability of websites, describes cbsnews24.com as:
A website that falsely presents itself as a CBS-affiliated television station that has published hoax stories.
According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.
The website cbsnews24.com was only registered (anonymously) on 2018-11-26 according to WHOIS information and the story seems to have been seeded initially through a now-deleted Reddit account.
The site follows the same modus operandi as a slew of earlier sites all designed to look like legitimate news sites from legitimate U.S. news and entertainment brands. Older sites we identified as being part of this network include:
- www.abcnews-us.com
- www.boston-post.com
- www.coindesk-us.com
- www.foxnews-us.com
- www.si-nba.com
- www.thenyherald.com
- www.tmz-us.com
- www.us-nbcnews.com
- www.vice-en-us.com
- www.yahoonews-us.com
The current site shares several advertising network ID codes with other sites in this network and uses the same WordPress template previously used by several other of the older sites (including the telltale misspelling of "science" as "sciens" in the footer).
We wrote about cbsnews24.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
