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Unfortunately, sometimes fact-checking goes wrong. Or not at all. As we were one of the many sites to mistook the main source for something it wasn’t, we have to apologize for posting the story as well. From Examiner:

Friday, a news report from an NBC affiliate in New York circulated the web via blogs claiming that police were searching for a man named Isaac Don Burks for intentionally spreading HIV in the NY Tri-State area. Over the weekend the story spread like wildfire via blogs, Facebook, Twitter, even Michael Baisden and Steve Harvey shared the “story”. On Monday, the original source was called into question when the link being shared redirected to an Augusta news site.

The original source came from a fake site made to look like the NBC New York 4 website. The slight difference was in the domain. The real NBC affiliate’s domain is www.nbcnewyork.com the fake site used www.nbcnewyork4.com. The original story url still shows up in Google search as http://nbcnewyork4.com/news/local/fugitive-wanted-for-intentionally-spre… yet you no longer go to the original report. Instead, when you click on the link you are directed to an Augusta story about the same man, but for a different incident in 2010 involving identity fraud and forgery.

Let’s not forget that there was a picture used (above) fron a guy that might now be having the worst year ever due to the hoax. He took to his Facebook page to address the matter.

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