Fake Hurricane Sandy Photos, Sharks Swimming in the Streets of NJ

No we don't have Sharks swimming in the Streets of Cape May or Brigantine , New Jersey

As Hurricane Sandy clobbered the the most populated region of the United States, many people took to social media and the Internet to receive and circulate information about what experts called a 100-year storm. It's amazing what can be done with Photo shop a few extra hours on your laptop at home in a storm. All of these Fake Hurricane Sandy Photos were in circulation during the storm on Twitter and Face book.

As is typically the case with natural disasters -- especially in this digital age -- viral photos quickly put a face on the catastrophe. However, it turns out many of the most popular images pin balling around the Internet during the storm were either fake or outdated. Even major media outlets got duped.

Here are a few of the  fake photos that got passed around the Internet during Sandy's wrath


The fakes come in three varieties:

 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy,
 2) Photo shopped images that are straight up fake,
 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photo shopped pictures being trotted out again.

Did we Have Sharks Swimming in the Streets of New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy?

This image popped up while we were researching a *different* supposed shark photo from Brigantine, which we have not been able to verify one way or the other. Though we've found no evidence to indicate that the photo below is fake, we're suspicious because of the number of times fake shark photos have cropped up during floods. The photo below was originally posted by Kevin McCarty, who appears to live in that town. This is a complicated situation because McCarty posted both of these photographs, one of which we now know to be fake, and on the Facebook thread for that image, people call out his Photoshop skills. It's still possible, all these hours later, that the photo below is real and McCarty decided to have some fun with the picture above, or that they are both fakes.