by Vito Rispo

Apparently, all you have to do to make money online is invent a fake, but morally reprehensible, tragedy, put together a video about said tragedy, then sell t-shirts.

Oh, I almost forgot… then PROFIT.

The Save Our Cats and Kittens From Fishermen (SOCKFF) video has been making the rounds of the blogosphere for a while now, and still, not many people have called shenanigans on it. That amazes me. This video is obviously fake. It has zero evidence of it’s claim, it doesn’t show any cats being eaten by sharks, it doesn’t show any cats being pierced with hooks (although a gloved man pretends to), it doesn’t show anything really. It only shows black cats supposedly dangling from a hook, and a gloved man pretending to hook a kitten but blocking the camera’s view at the last second. Take a look at the cat dangling frame:





If that cat were actually dangling from a hook that had been pierced through it’s back skin, the skin would be stretched out far more than it is there. In fact, it looks like the cat’s actually hanging from some type of harness around it’s midsection. Take a good look. This video is fake, and it’s fairly obviously fake in my opinion.

The owner of the website, a guy by the name of Grady Warren apparently, is a genius. He posts a video that pulls at the sad strings of animal lovers everywhere, then he sells t-shirts. People think they’re helping out the kitties, but all he does (supposedly, he may not even do this) is donate a portion of the proceeds to either the lunatic PETA cult, the SPCA, the World Wildlife Fund, or the Humane Society. What percentage of the funds go to those charities? Who knows. It could be as little as 1 cent per thousand dollars. Warren does post this little disclaimer:

We are a for-profit Florida Corporation. We are promoting awareness of animal abuse and our donations to these four established charities will be used as the individual organizations choose.

The really interesting thing about this whole SOCKFF affair isn’t that it exists, since this scam has been around for a long time (it used to be dog’s as bait). The interesting thing is that so many people have been fooled by it. Face it, very bizarre shit happens in the world, and the internet has video of a lot of it, so it stands to reason that something like this could be true. That possibility is all he needs, the long tail of the internet does the rest. If only a small number of the people who see that video end up buying a t-shirt, he’s at least recouped the money he spent making the shirts. Genius business plan if you ask me. Well done, Grady Warren.



Is this the mysterious business genius, Grady Warren? The world may never know.