Fake News: Barack Obama Did NOT Sign $100.000 Check To The Muslim Brotherhood

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

Today's fake story from The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense is titled: "LEAKED: Photo Of Personal Check From Obama's Bank Account Proves He's A Traitor" and it comes with an image purportedly of a cheque written by Barack Obama to the Muslim American Brotherhood International. The story opens:

Someone who works at the National Federal Employee's Credit Union in Washington DC has taken a great personal risk to release a picture of a check processed through the bank, written by none other than former president and traitor to his country, Barack Hussein Obama. The check was written to "MABI," which is the acronym for the Muslim American Brotherhood International:

checkfake.jpg

First clue the story is fake: the EXIF data on the image reveals it was created today by a "Christopher Blair", a full week after the date on the check (3/17/2017). The signature was probably found via Google and the segoe script font used on the image is quite commonly used in word processing software.

EXIF

Artist christopher blair
DateTimeOriginal 2017:03:25 10:39:19
CreateDate 2017:03:25 10:39:19
SubSecTimeOriginal 72
SubSecTimeDigitized 72
Padding (Binary data 2060 bytes)
XPAuthor christopher blair

Christopher Blair is also known as "Busta Troll" and his hobbies include trolling conservatives online.

Furthermore The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense is a fake news website that carries following disclaimer on its about page:

DISCLAIMER: The Resistance may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don't necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney. Pictures that represent actual people should be considered altered and not in any way real.

The site also tends to include nonsensical phrases or insults hints in the list of "categories" under the article titles:

idiotagain.jpg

According to Buzzfeed the site was originally meant to troll conservatives with over the top satirical articles but now appears to be used as a 'source' by a large network of actual fake news sites (not related to the original creator) that all repost the same articles mentioning it as the source but not acknowlediging the satire disclaimer. This causes many people to believe the fake stories especially when they are being shared on social media where all context is removed and only the title, image and description remain. Sites in the network appear to include:

The story with the forged check is spreading rapidly as you can see for yourself in the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article. If you notice anyone spreading it around thinking it is real you can help by pointing them to this article here because nobody likes being trolled with fake news.

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion