UPDATED, Sept. 24, 10:48 a.m. ET: The nude photo leak threat targeting Emma Watson earlier this week turned out to be a viral marketing stunt by a site calling itself Rantic Marketing. Rantic claims to want to shut down the website 4chan, but the "social media marketing enterprise" may itself just be a hoax.

The original website surrounding the false leaks, EmmaYouAreNext.com, threatened to release nude photographs of the 24-year-old actress and included a clock counting down to Saturday at midnight ET. The person who posted the website said it was in retaliation for Watson's well-received speech that she gave at the United Nations on Sept. 20.

However, by midnight on Wednesday, the URL redirected to Rantic Marketing's website. Watson's face and the countdown clock has been replaced with a banner that says, "#shutdown4chan" and an open letter to President Barack Obama that claims celebrity publicists hired the marketing company to popularize a call for Internet censorship and the end of 4chan.

See also: Social Media Goes Wild Over Massive Celebrity Nude Photo Leak

Initially, the threats were reportedly posted on the anonymous, forum-based website 4chan, which was previously the center of previous celebrity photo hacks.

An earlier version of Rantic's website claimed to have worked with such companies as McDonald's and Rockstar Games. Mashable has reached out to those companies for comment.

It is still unknown if Rantic Marketing is a real company or if the Rantic website is simply another stunt in itself. Mashable reached out to Rantic via the email address on its website, but the message was returned as a failure. Business Insider attributed Rantic to "the most notorious gang of pranksters on the Internet."

Rantic listed "Brad Cockingham" as its CEO and founder, but no further information about that name could be found.

A Reddit thread posted on Tuesday outed Rantic Marketing as being the source for the EmmaYouAreNext.com website, and pointed to a pastebin document where someone going by "Gammarays" connected Rantic to the threats as well as the online magazine Foxweekly.com.

According to the document, Rantic.com, EmmaYouAreNext.com and FoxWeekly.com are all "hosted on the same server or share at least one server in common."

However an update to the pastebin claimed that the server status resource had been removed from the website. Mashable has not yet confirmed this claim.

UPDATE: The /server-status resource was removed from the server about the same time a series of cryptic tweets were made on the @RanticMarketing Twitter account.

Foxweekly was one of the first websites to blame 4chan for creating the threatening website. However, Foxweekly provided no evidence to verify that claim.

According to the Reddit thread, Foxweekly was previously known as Swenzy, and earlier SocialVEVO, both known for viral marketing pranks, including a similar countdown website surrounding a Family Guy hoax in 2013, the Daily Dot reports.