Hoax-Slayer

» see hoax-slayer.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The genre reached me. The website did not. Forwarded warnings were a universal condition of having an email address in the early 2000s and Turkish inboxes got their full share of them, but the debunking happened in English on sites I did not go looking for, and Hoax-Slayer was one of the ones I never found.

Brett Christensen started it in August 2003 from Bundaberg, in Queensland, where he had been working as a caravan park cleaner. It was one person writing about one thing, and the thing was the false story that arrives already vouched for by somebody you trust.

The mechanics were simple enough that they never needed revising. Somebody sends you a message saying a virus will erase your hard drive, or that a missing child needs sharing right now. You paste a distinctive phrase into a search engine. Hoax-Slayer comes up with the origin of the claim written out and the reason it is not true.

Eighteen years is a long time to do that alone. He closed the site on 31 May 2021, having announced it on the 22nd, and the reasons were entirely ordinary. The advertising no longer covered what it cost, and he was working full time away from the computer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the forwarded email years ~

The 2003 to 2010 window was the peak of the chain email as a delivery system, and it had a specific texture. The message came from a real person who believed it, and it ended with an instruction to pass it on. Usually it carried the fingerprints of nine previous forwards at the top, angle brackets and all.

What made a site like this necessary is that the sender was never the author. There was no account to check and no profile to look at, only a claim that had arrived through a chain of people who each assumed somebody earlier had verified it. A searchable archive of the claims themselves was the only workable answer, and it is more or less the answer we still use.

~ one man in bundaberg ~

By 2009 the site was making somewhere around fifty thousand dollars a year from advertising. That number is worth sitting with. It was enough for one person in a regional Queensland town to keep going, and nowhere near enough to become an organization, so Hoax-Slayer stayed exactly the size it started at while the problem it addressed grew into an industry.

The claims moved from email to Facebook and the site followed them without changing its method. Then the advertising economics that had supported a solo writer since 2003 stopped working, which happened to a great many one-person sites in the same years and for the same reasons.

In early 2025 Christensen started publishing under the Hoax-Slayer name again, as a newsletter on Substack. The original site is gone regardless. hoax-slayer.net does not resolve, and eighteen years of debunked chain mail went with it.

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