Engadget ended up with egg on its face after a phony email purportedly from Apple led them to believe the iPhone and OSX Leopard would be delayed.
Investors Suckered By Fake Apple News
Not a single blogger out there would have been able to avoid the temptation of a red hot tip from deep inside Apple’s HQ. Engadget editor Ryan Block didn’t, and posted the scoop: delays for the wildly anticipated iPhone and Leopard would be announced.
In a twist of fate straight out of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, the email cited by Block in his post proved to be a fake. Block explained what happened in an update to the original story:
Here’s the story. A trustworthy source supplied us with an actual internal Apple email that went out to thousands of Apple employees earlier today (published after the break). The fact that this was an email sent within Apple’s internal email system to its employees is not in question. Let us reiterate: this was an ACTUAL email distributed within Apple’s internal email system to Apple employees.
A later message from Apple claimed the message was a fake. “Presumably Apple is now on the hunt for whomever was able to spoof its internal email system,” Block said.
Investors bit on the news before it was corrected. Not long after Engadget published its story, trading volume jumped for shares of AAPL, and the price dropped. After the correction, shares returned to near the opening price.
As a commenter on Valleywag pointed out, the Securities and Exchange Commission is probably going to take an interest in this. Potential stock manipulation, even the hint of it on the major exchanges, tends to do that.
