{"id":1005548,"date":"2022-02-27T15:45:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-27T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/02\/27\/under-fire-eastern-truck-driver-confesses-his-tik-tok-viral-video-was-a-hoax\/"},"modified":"2022-02-27T15:45:00","modified_gmt":"2022-02-27T15:45:00","slug":"under-fire-eastern-truck-driver-confesses-his-tik-tok-viral-video-was-a-hoax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/02\/27\/under-fire-eastern-truck-driver-confesses-his-tik-tok-viral-video-was-a-hoax\/","title":{"rendered":"Under fire Eastern truck driver confesses his Tik Tok viral video was a hoax"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A truck driver thought he could get more followers by lying about a lion that was strolling freely on the N10.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It has ended in tears for him.\u00a0The dramatic night-time visual of the lion caused great alarm at the weekend, but by late Sunday it died down after the provincial transport department said the animal had been \u201crecaptured\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, trucker Phumlani Masina said in a statement, and confirmed to The Herald in a phone call yesterday, that it was all a fabrication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made a fake video of a lion that I \u2018saw\u2019 between Cradock and Middelburg,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI obtained the video from the internet and I edited it with my TikTok account.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole video of the lion was false and a hoax.<\/p>\n

\u201cI apologise for my actions that caused panic and distress to all the people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Masina\u2019s boss, Johan Bezuidenhout, the operations manager at Lenata and Northstar transport companies, confirmed Masina was one of his truck drivers and that he had obtained the statement from him after he had investigated concerns raised by Cradock game farm Tam Safaris.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems after he had edited the video he sent it on to other truckers and that is how it spread.\u201d<\/p>\n

Irvin Tam, co-owner of Tam Safaris, which was involved in the search for the lion on Sunday after the initial alert was posted on a Cradock community group on Saturday night, said he just wanted the real story to come out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe couldn\u2019t find anything even after putting up a helicopter for five hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were also not missing any animals and then we saw it was a TikTok video and we became sceptical and managed to track down the culprit.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He said Tam Safaris had pursued the matter because they were concerned that people who had been following the story would think the \u201crecaptured\u201d lion was theirs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there was an escaped lion or a recaptured lion it\u2019s hardly something we would have been able to hide.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the farmers and security people were there on the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wildlife Ranching SA provincial chair John Hurter said: \u201cThere was no breakout of a lion as far as I am aware.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eastern Cape transport department spokesperson Unathi Binqose said the department had first heard about the lion from their officials who posted about it on one of the department\u2019s WhatsApp groups.<\/p>\n

Wary about peddling fake news, he had contacted traffic officers in the Cradock area about the matter<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.heraldlive.co.za\/news\/2022-02-25-tiktokking-trucker-confesses-to-hoax-highway-lion-video\/<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A truck driver thought he could get more followers by lying about a lion that was strolling freely on the N10.\u00a0 It has ended in tears for him.\u00a0The dramatic night-time visual of the lion caused great alarm at the weekend, but by late Sunday it died down after the provincial transport department said the animal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1005549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3894],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}