A Fake McDonald’s Twitter Account Fooled Corporate For Months, Then Things Got Disturbing
Hong Kong McDonalds is having a crisis pic.twitter.com/Cj51YL4VBK
— Satchel Price (@SatchelPrice) July 29, 2017
A fake Twitter account was able to fool McDonald’s into thinking it owned the account for nearly nine months before things went south.
The account went by the handle @Mc_DonaldsHK, which was close enough to the standard method McDonald’s uses to name their regional Twitter accounts (ie. @McDonalds_DMV for the Washington DC Area) that nobody looked twice. The false handle was even tagged by the official McDonald’s page as a resource for some angry Hong Kong-based customers to vent their complaints, according to Mashable.
Nobody began to notice what was really going on until about a week ago, when the @Mc_DonaldsHK handle began to suddenly tweet from a dark and unsettling mindset. It started with a simple snarky comment tweeted at an angry customer, saying “This bitch freakin out about cheesecake while kids out here McDying. relax.” Then, things began to escalate to a whole other level.
McDonald’s Hong Kong’s timeline is a bit odd. pic.twitter.com/zLC3SwUSLB
— Tom McLaughlin (@_TomMcLaughlin) July 29, 2017
A collection of more of the handle’s rants about suicide, depression, and losing a wife and kids can be found on Gizmodo, where the entire stream was captured before the Twitter account was eventually caught and suspended, deleting all of the original tweets.
McDonald’s caught on as the fake account gained hundreds of followers, telling the Washington Post that the account was not theirs and that it had been reported to Twitter. The account tried to change their name and suggest that they were a parody account when this happened, but got suspended in the end anyway.
In the meantime, we still don’t know who was behind the parody account or if they’re okay. Then again, we don’t know if there was any truth to the dark and depressing rants.
