April Fools Day jokes don;t always go to plan (Picture: Getty)

April Fools’ Day is a great opportunity for a bit of high-jinks but there can be serious consequences if the joke backfires.

Unsurprisingly, there exists a long list of moments when pranks haven’t led to the intended consequences.

We have selected some of the more notorious examples for you below:

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Texting your daughter to say there is a school shooting

Angela Timmons was arrested after her hoax went wrong (Picfture: Spartanberg County Sheriff’s Office)

Angela Timmons thought it would be a good idea to text her daughter on April 1 2014 claiming she could hear gun shots being fired at the college she worked at,


Understandably concerned, Angela’s daughter April couldn’t get hold of her mum after receiving the message so decided to call 911 instead.



Being America, where mass shootings aren’t a rarity, police were at Virginia Colleges in Spartanburg County in minutes only to find no shooting had taken place.

Timmons was then arrested on charges including aggravated breach of peace and disturbing a school.

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Telling a colleague on holiday a major report is due early

Glenn Howlett’s colleagues at London City Hall in Ontario thought it would be funny to interrupt his holiday to say a major report he was working on was due early.

Glenn, clearly being very conscientious, immediately cut his trip short but when considering the enormity of the task he faced became so stressed he started having heart palpations, collapsed and took time off work.

During his recovery, he decided on reflection that it wasn’t worth it and took early retirement. He then sued his former employer for damages.

The city now has a by-law prohibiting practical jokes at work.

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The one where you accidentally inflame Middle Eastern tensions

An Israeli intelligence officer’s prank back fired (Picture: Getty)

Considering the wider picture, it’s difficult to know what was going through the mind of this army intelligence officer.

In 1986, an Israeli intelligence officer decided to use April 1 as an excuse to falsify a news memo saying that Nabih Berri, leader of the Shi’ite Amal movement, had been seriously wounded in an assassination attempt.

It was swiftly reported by Israeli radio and broadcast in Hebrew and English throughout the morning until it was retracted.

The news caused an immediate flare up in tensions in the region with Israel’s Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, announced the unnamed officer would be court-martialed.

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The one causing a bit of a British landmark to fall in to the sea

Southern FM’s Beachy Head prank got a little out of hand (Picture: Getty)

On the face of it this seems like a relatively harmless prank.

In 2001, a DJ on Southern FM in Brighton broadcast that a replica of the Titanic could be seen from Beachy Head in east Sussex.

The problem was that hundreds of listeners believed him, some driving as far as 40 miles, to catch a glimpse of the ship.

One woman called Joyce Smart told the Telegraph she drove more than 30 miles with her two kids to see the ship and felt like a bit of an ‘idiot’.



Coastguards weren’t happy either and later identified a large crack in the cliff face, caused by the weight of so many people stood on the cliffs.

It fell in to the sea a few days later.

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The one when your alien hoax almost gets a town evacuated

Al Ghad almost got an entire town evacuated

in 2010, Al Ghad newspaper ran an article claiming that an UFO had landed near the town of Jafr in Jordan.

But what they thought would be a hilarious prank almost turned in to a mass evacuation of 13,000 people when the town’s mayor, Mohammed Mleihan, was fooled and dispatched security forces.

‘Students didn’t go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town’s 13,000 residents,’ the Telegraph reported him as saying.

‘People were scared that aliens would attack them.’

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And… when a student used April Fools’ Day as a cover to kill his flatmate

Lin Senhao poisoned his flatmate on April 1 (Picture: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock)

Former medical student Lin Senhao poisoned his flat mate’s water cooler causing him to suffer multiple organ failure.

The 28-year-old from China recently lost his appeal against the death sentence he received for the intentional homicide of Huang Yang.

He had tried to claim that he only intended to cause his room mate some discomfort by putting toxic chemical N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) in a water cooler.

But his story began to unravel when it turned out he examined his flat mate on April 2 and told him there was nothing wrong.

He even visited hospital while his victim remained undiagnosed but didn’t tell anyone what had happened.

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