Ladies and gentlemen, here's some news you can use: You've been lied to at least once in the year 2014 by the Internet.

More specifically, one of the biggest B.S. stories to make it round the globe has its roots in Singapore:

In the early part of this year, did you happen to notice this widely-shared article above popping up on your Facebook newsfeed or Twitter?

You might have seen it republished on a few other websites, but most likely, you encountered it on a Singapore tech lifestyle site called Vulcan Post.

Titled "If you’re still poor at 35, you deserve it!", it was credited to Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba, the richest man in China.

The original piece first appeared on a dubious-looking website in Chinese that makes it a questionable source, but that didn't deter Vulcan Post from translating it into English to appeal to the English-speaking world (in other words, effectively the rest of the non-China world).

It's a fake

Well, it turns out, this piece is fake and never written by Ma, a fact that has been confirmed to be pure B.S. by Alibaba.

Highly authoritative Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper, The Guardian, confirmed in a blog post on Sept. 26, 2014:

A recent hoax highlighted the resentment many feel against the perceived condescension of rich CEOs when jobs are unavailable and student debt is high.

Ma’s speech at the Clinton Global Initiative took place around the same time that a fake op-ed, allegedly written by Ma, began circulating on the internet.

“If you’re still poor at 35, you deserve it,” the piece declared.

“We can confirm that the article was not written by Jack,” an Alibaba spokesperson told the Guardian.

And the Guardian very helpfully even linked in their blog post the perpetrator of the hoax: They directed readers to Vulcan Post, which is -- in the interest of full disclosure -- a totally independent tech lifestyle site that happened to receive a six-figure funding from troubled blogger advertising network Gushcloud.

What are the implications?

So, now that we have gotten the inconvenient truth out of the way, what is the problem of saying that Jack Ma authored a piece like this when he clearly didn't?

Firstly, on hindsight, there was apparently very little verification of the veracity of the source of the article.

Which then made the Alibaba chief look like a condescending douchebag for supposedly saying the things he said in the article.

And secondly, it gives the impression that CEOs are free to lecture others, even when Ma might actually be one of the humblest men from China who happens to be a billionaire.

And this had the effect of baiting other websites around the world to start copying and pasting the piece without verifying its source, which only served to add more credibility to it, and obviously, bank on Ma's name -- who increasingly became an unwilling participant in the lie.

Lastly, this wasn't the only post about Jack Ma on Vulcan Post.

In February, they had another piece titled "Billionaire Jack Ma teaches you how to be successful in life and business", which had also been translated from the same dubious-looking Chinese website.

Whether this piece is real or not is no longer the point. Because it sure looks fake as hell as well.

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