Did the Aurora gunman who killed 12 early Friday morning warn of the impending massacre on the meme messageboard 9gag? No, but some 9gaggers want you to think so.

Details are only just emerging about the 24-year-old shooter who killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo., but some denizens of the 4chan-like messageboard 9gag are claiming he was one of them.

That claim is "almost certainly false," reports Gawker's Adrian Chen, who on Friday caught wind of the 9gag angle being reported by some media outlets.

Indeed, "evidence" of the gunman's supposed activity on 9gag is almost certainly fabricated, including a "warning" he is claimed to have posted on the message board a day before the shooting.

What we actually know about the gunman, identified as James Holmes after being taken into custody minutes after his violent rampage in Theater Nine at the Century 16 movie theater in an Aurora mall complex is, in short, not a lot. He lives in a rented apartment, which police now say he booby-trapped, about five miles from the site of the shooting. He's a former medical student. ABC News spoke with a woman in San Diego who claimed to be his mother.

That's about it, as far as information from official sources and credible news organizations goes. But in the confusion of the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the pranksters of 9gag may be exploiting the situation to send some journalists and curious news watchers down a trollish rabbit hole.

They're claiming that Holmes was a 9gag user going by the handle "9GAGftw" who supposedly posted a warning on the site on Thursday in the form of an image about the shooting. The supposed image, constructed in a familiar meme-friendly format, takes an image of Nazis in a crowded theater taken from the film Inglourious Basterds but replaces the film they're watching with a shot from the current Batman trilogy. Stamped across the image are the words, "TOMORROW I WILL KILL EVERYONE DURING THE NEW BATMAN PREMIERE IN COLORADO PEOPLE WILL DIE FOR THE GLORY OF LE 9GAG ARMY !!!"

The trouble is, the image is supposedly a screen grab of a 9gag post that's been deleted, conveniently making it impossible to verify if the so-called warning was actually present on the site "1 day ago" as claimed in the post details. Those details also indicate that at the time of the supposed screen grab, the image had been tweeted 36 times and shared on Facebook 365 timesbut PCMag's attempts to find it in tweets and Facebook posts from a day ago have so far turned up zilch.

The other "evidence" of the gunman's supposed activities on 9gag comes in the form of a Friday post from user "myjas" that claims, "WE DID IT!! WE GOT HIM TO ACTUALLY SHOOT IN THE THEATRE xD!!"

In a stunning coincidence, the celebratory message from myjas also happens to have been tweeted precisely 36 times and shared on Facebook exactly 365 times.

Despite clear signs that this is all a hoax, some media outlets have taken the bait. Canoncurrent.com, for example, reported that Holmes "apparently bragged about his plans on the social media website 9gag.com" and that "[u]sers of the website are saying that the person or persons running the 9gag.com website egged him on."

Another site, Blottr.com, has added some new "details" to the story, citing 9gag users as saying Holmes actually posted as "JamesHolmes124," but that the username now doesn't exist. The European news site also speculates that "[i]t's possible 9Gag have removed the [supposed image warning] post to avoid causing offence or have been asked to do so whilst law enforcement agencies investigate. Because the post has been removed, it is very hard to tell from a screenshot if the post has been photoshopped. However, some online users of 9Gag have commented on the issue suggesting that the user was known on the forum and sent a warning a few weeks ago."

Gawker's Chen noted that muddying the waters in this fashion in the aftermath of a high-profile shooting "is an old 4chan trick" and currently, all signs point to some users of 4chan knock-off 9gag trying to pull off the same, well, gag.

UPDATE: Internet culture researcher Whitney Phillips posits that the 9gag "connection" to the Aurora shooting may actually have originated from enemies of 9gag, mainly users of rival troll site 4chan who are trying to make 9gag look bad.

"One major detail is missing from this accountit's called Operation 9gag, and has been in effect on 4chan since late 2011. Essentially the op is an attempt to frame 9gag for everything terrible on the Internet," Phillips writes in a blog post that lays out the case for the whole thing being internecine troll warfare and little more.