"Over the past 2 weeks we set up a plot to see if we could trick Buzzfeed into posting something that is fake, for the laughs. There was a female only tournament hosted by a company known as ESL, for a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. We decided to pose as a 'transgendered' pro team, we made it as ridiculous as possible by uploading obvious troll pics to our profiles on the tournament’s website (pics of us wearing wigs, etc). We knew we were going to get declined into joining the tournament, so once we did get turned down, I then sent an email to a Buzzfeed 'journalist' by the name of Lane Sainty to try and bait them into making a story out of it", Rigilio told Infowars.

“We did nothing to hide our team name, which was 'Rigatoni Family' and if you were to search that name into Google, you’d find our channel and website where we clearly are shit disturbers. It’s blatant negligence on the behalf of Buzzfeed and other news orgs that have since picked up the story, aka Fake News", Rigilio went on to tell Infowars.

BuzzFeed published a story on Friday evening about how a team of transgender females had been barred from competing in one of ESL's female-only events. The story was widely reported and discussed within the CS:GO community. Fragbite wrote about the story , as well as the subsequent fallout, as well.In the article, the team's captain Sly Buehl Rigilio explained how embarassed the entire team felt when they were asked to prove that they were, in fact, women, and felt as if they had been ostracized solely due to the fact that they were trans.But earlier today, controversial news website Infowars published a story featuring an interview Sly Buehl Rigilio, who proceeded to explain that the entire story was, in fact, a prank. The players went on to tell Infowars that they had spent the past two weeks prior to the competition in an attempt to trick BuzzFeed into picking up the story.Prior to the story by Infowars, ESL spokesperson Anna Rozwandowicz told BuzzFeed News that they had chosen to exclude the team from competing due to earlier instances where men had attempted to register for female-only competitions.Following the publication of the initial story, ESL elected to rework its ruleset in order to better address minorities looking to compete in esports, through AnyKey, which is a partnership between ESL, and Intel.