UnNews:Google, Yahoo! join forces to combat "lol fraud"

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

31 August 2006

An authentic LOL.

SILICON VALLEY, California. GNN (GOANNA NEWS NETWORK) -- INTERNET giants Google and Yahoo! have formed an unprecedented alliance in a bid to stamp out lol fraud, which they believe has the potential to undermine public confidence in their internets, with potentially disastrous consequences for shareholders and Western civilisation in general.

Lol fraud occurs when an internet user types the "word" lol on an interweb message board or in a chatroom or email when he or she is not actually laughing out loud.

An ethnographic study commissioned by the search-engine leviathans and carried out by Sneaky Peak Surveillance Inc (a leading supplier of candid public-toilet footage to low-end pornographic websites) found that as many as 98% of lols are fraudulent, a figure that rises to 99.8% for lmaos.

The six-month video survey of 160,000 home computers and bathrooms recorded only a handful of instances of rofl and roflmao, and these were all teenagers who were stoned out of their gourds and who then went to the kitchen make Pop Tarts and so forgot to alert other users to the fact that they'd been rofling.

No laughing matter: Half-man, half-pig things yesterday.

There was not one documented case of a roflcopter.

In a sign of an emerging trend, Blizzard Interactive, the maker of the massively multiplayer online time-wasting game World of Warcraft this week redeployed its crack squad of cyber sleuths from chasing gold farmers and free server providers to tracking down lol fraudsters.

A spokesman for Blizzard, Eddie Izzard, said the high volume of lols on the company's servers was suspicious, particularly given such chat as "going for a smoke brb lol!!!" and "i found 2 gold!!! ROFL!!!!"

"It is true that laughter is a psychological defence mechanism that helps people cope in times of war or violence," Izzard said. "You would expect to find a certain amount of gallows humour, for instance, in places such as Nazi death camps or in the Barrens, where you can find yourself being attacked simultaneously by a lion, a dinosaur and some sort of half-man, half-pig thing. Still, something clearly stinks."

Google's Dougal MacDougall, said via email that lol fraud was an infinitely bigger problem than click fraud.

"Let's face it, any business that is stupid enough to pay us for our shitty little ads deserves to be taken to the cleaners by their competitors' clickbots," he said. "LOL!!!"