The nude photo leak surrounding Emma Watson threatened earlier this week turned out to be a viral marketing stunt by an organization known as Rantic Marketing to shut down the website 4chan.
The website surrounding the false leaks, EmmaYouAreNext.com, threatened to release nude photographs of the 24-year-old actress on Saturday at 12 a.m. ET, but the website which has been counting down the minutes included a note on Tuesday indicating an earlier launch.
By midnight Wednesday, Watson's face and the countdown clock had been replaced on the website, which now pushes visitors to Rantic Marketing's own homepage, which includes an open letter to President Barack Obama that claims celebrity publicists hired the company to popularize a call for internet censorship and the end of 4chan.
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Initially, the anonymous, forum-based website 4chan was fingered for the threats, after Watson delivered a well-received speech at the United Nations on Saturday. 4chan has previously been the center of previous celebrity photo hacks.
A previous version of Rantic's website claimed to have worked with such organizations as McDonalds and Rockstar Games, it now displays a campaign to shut down 4chan, including the letter to Obama.
A Reddit thread posted on Tuesday outed Rantic Marketing as being the source for the website, and pointed to a pastebin document where someone going by "Gammarays" connected Rantic to the threats as well as the online magazine Foxweekly.com.
According to the document, Rantic.com, EmmaYouAreNext.com and FoxWeekly.com are all "hosted on the same server or share at least one server in common."
However an update to the pastebin claimed that the server status resource had been removed from the website.
This claim has not yet been confirmed by Mashable. Update: The /server-status resource was removed from the server about the same time a series of cryptic tweets were made on the @RanticMarketing Twitter account. Seems like they might suspect something is up. Foxweekly was one of the first websites to blame 4chan for creating the threatening website, however they included no evidence that this was true.
According to the Reddit thread, Foxweekly was previously known as Swenzy, and earlier SocialVEVO, both known for viral marketing pranks, including a similar countdown website surrounding a Family Guy hoax in 2013, the Daily Dot reports.
This claim has not yet been confirmed by Mashable. Update: The /server-status resource was removed from the server about the same time a series of cryptic tweets were made on the @RanticMarketing Twitter account. Seems like they might suspect something is up. Foxweekly was one of the first websites to blame 4chan for creating the threatening website, however they included no evidence that this was true.
According to the Reddit thread, Foxweekly was previously known as Swenzy, and earlier SocialVEVO, both known for viral marketing pranks, including a similar countdown website surrounding a Family Guy hoax in 2013, the Daily Dot reports.