Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The man who got arrested for pretending to be a Moroccan prince on Facebook

The man who got arrested for pretending to be a Moroccan prince on Facebook

In the U.S., pretending to be a celebrity online is something of a trend. There's a whole slew of fake celebrity blogs out there. Search Facebook or MySpace and you'll find dozens of pages supposedly opened by Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes -- all fake.

The Moroccan government, though, apparently isn't quite hip with this trend, and in 2008 arrested a man for creating a Facebook profile under the guise of the brother of King Mohammed VI.

The man, 26-year-old Fouad Mourtada, was arrested and charged with "villainous practices," a very dire and vague sounding offense. At this point, it's unknown just what he said on the fake profile and whether his intents were malicious or satirical, but it's safe to say that whatever he was doing with the fake Facebook identity wasn't terribly amusing to the Moroccan government.

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