There is no truth to the story about a supposed NFL lawyer by the name of "Dan Goodes" being found dead in New York City after telling reporters that the upcoming Super Bolw LII was "rigged". The story originated on notoriously unreliable website YourNewsWire.com in an article (archived here) titled "NFL Lawyer, Who Claimed Super Bowl Is 'Rigged', Found Dead" which opened:
An NFL entertainment lawyer, who has worked for the corporation for more than 15 years, has been found dead in New York City hours after telling reporters that Super Bowl LII is "rigged."
Dan Goodes was found dead in his hometown of New York City in what early reports described as an "gangland-style execution", hours after blowing the whistle on the "rigged Super Bowl" backstage at a promotional event in Minneapolis.
First of all, the picture of the crime scene that accompanied the article is from a 2017 story about a police officer being killed in his patrol car in the Bronx neighbourhood.
We also found no trace of anyone named "Dan Goodes" on the internet in combination with the search term "NFL", other than exact copies of the hoax story. A real existing person who worked as a lawyer for the NFL would definitely return more hits.
And finally the illustration used to show "NFL Headquarters" in the article was ripped straight from the animated comedy series "South Park", it is not even a real photo. It is kind of hard to take any story with so many easily verifiable falsehoods seriously.
YourNewsWire has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page "The People's Voice" recently lost its verification checkmark according to a report from MMFA.
The Terms of Use of the site also make it clear they don't really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:
THE PEOPLE'S VOICE, INC. AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
The site was profiled in the Hollywood reporter where it was described as:
Your News Wire, a 3-year-old website of murky facts and slippery spin, is published by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway -- a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 -- out of an apartment in L.A.'s historic El Royale.
RationalWiki described it as:
YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com[1]) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto ("News. Truth. Unfiltered").[1]
A while ago we also reported that YourNewsWire had rebranded itself as NewsPunch by changing its domain name in an apparent effort to evade filtering/blocking. It appears the site has changed back to it's old name in the mean time but you can still see the NewsPunch name in the contact email address in the footer.
