By David Simister, reporter
I KNEW there was something fishy going on with the e-mails I got earlier this week, but its anonymous writer reckoned he'd got us hook, line and sinker.
We seem to get millions of e-mails every week and yes, they have proven to be a revolution when it comes to chasing stories. The only problem is that I only tend to take an interest in ones about news stories in North Wales; the 24th anniversary of Britain's third best-selling brand of jam I don't.
This week's one was an absolute gem. An Abergele fisherman had caught a record-breaking 18lb brown trout in one of the region's fisheries, and an e-mail purporting to be from the fishery's owner offered me the chance to net some nifty coverage in this week's Weekly News. Only one problem: it wasn't true.
I don't know who the hoaxer was - funnily, he chose to remain completely anonymous - but he clearly reckoned we're too lazy to check our stories before running them. A quick call to the fishery's owners confirmed no records had been broken, the e-mail had nothing to do with them, and the picture "they" had promised to send was a internet-copied fake.
Oddly, the next e-mail from our hoaxing friend implied he'd had us "hook, line and sinker". Perhaps if we'd run a spoof story on our pages, he would have done. Yet all he's achieved is wasting a lot of people's time and falsely assuming a hardworking Abergele businessman's identity (although it was quite funny).
As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, only dead fish swim with the stream.
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