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Over the last year many Internet users have encountered a tragic story of an estranged husband named Brandon Dugan who murdered his wife and three children after a protective order had been issued against him: The general outlines of this story are (unfortunately) not unique in the annals of crime, but in this particular case the same essentially fictional story has been spread online, with identical details, utilizing multiple domains and varying geographic locales. First of all, this article’s headline is always presented as Mother and 3 Kids Found Dead in [name], Dad Arrested, where [name] is a varying roster of counties and cities across the U.S., such as Anne Arundel County, Pennington County, Bladen County, Herkimer County, Frederick County, Cobb County, Eddy County, Bakersfield, Springfield,and Hattiesburg. A simple Google search reveals some of the many areas in which the very same tragedy is reported to have taken place: Moreover, the iterations of this story all share the same glaring journalistic flaws, such as the fact that they're bylined POLICE (even though reporters, not police, write for news outlets) and omit key details such as the date of the killings and the manner of death of the victims. Just like a previous story about a deadly car crash that killed two mothers and five children, these articles have been spread under a variety of domain names — including countyreports.info, county911.info, countynewsroom.info, newsrooms.info, foxreview.info, usnew.info, and xcounty.info — that appear to have no function other than propagating regional variations of the same story. All of these domains were registered by the same person in Tbilisi, Georgia, and have no obvious purpose outside the spreading of questionable (i.e., porn) advertisements and related malware.
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