Facebook Tattoo A Hoax

Yesterday’s news of a Dutch woman who tattooed her arm with all 152 of her Facebook (News - Alert) friends was squashed when the truth finally came out. The tattooed social networking lover was just an accomplice in a hoax. 
The YouTube (News - Alert) video by Susyj87 went viral this week. However, Rotterdam-based tattoo artist Dex Moelker came clean and admitted that the tattoo was actually temporary, not permanent. The reason? It was all an elaborate marketing stunt.
According to the Dutch press, the tattoo was just a transfer that washes off in a couple of days. The temporary tattoo only took a few hours to apply in a single session and not 30 hours as claimed in Susyj87's video.
The stunt was done on behalf of Pretty Social, a Dutch firm that sells Facebook-themed gifts, from mugs, to posters, to bags — but apparently, not tattoos. If you look closely at the video, you’ll notice that the pictures are, in fact, of a single person, not many. That was the clue that gave it all away.
So what we were led to believe was an intricate and complex tattooing process taking 30 hours was in fact the application of a temporary transfer that took just 2 hours to apply.
Strategically it is undeniably a clever campaign: what better way to attract potential customers than with another crackpot tattoo story that turns out to be a cleaner, safer and more pain-free way of getting a colorful and original tattoo? Still, it worked. The video was watched 500,000 times.
Facebook is notorious for hoaxes and trickery. Granted, the kind of hoaxes that spread are within the social networking site, not about or related to it in the case of Susyj87.
In March, police arrested a 17-year-old boy in connection with a Facebook hoax that got a little out of control. The teen faces charges claiming that he violated a section of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act in Australia designed to protect people from online harassment.
According to sources, the teen created a fake Facebook account for a girl he knew. He then used the account to create a birthday invitation. The invitation eventually drew 200,000 positive RSVPs.
The story is strikingly similar to the one where a teenager from Germany, in an effort to notify friends of her sweet 16 birthday party, ended up inviting quite a few more than she bargained for when she forgot to mark the invite “private” on the social networking site. Due to her mistake, the invitation went viral and, at her party, she wound up with 1500 guests.


Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.