Fake Cloverfield Websites Exposed: ABZ3293.com and ParasiteMovie.com

Friday, July 13, 2007

Dear Constant Reader,

Fake Cloverfield Websites Exposed: ABZ3293.com and ParasiteMovie.com

Posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 1:58 am by: Peter Sciretta

It started with this whole Ethan Haas fiasco. It seems like a new website appears everyday claiming to be the next official Cloverfield viral website. The problem is 99% of the websites are obvious fakes, yet the internet chatter continues to consider them legit. We’re getting sick of all the false information still floating around, so we’ve decided to make it our mission to expose the more widespread fakes. Here is a round up of sites that are NOT connected to Cloverfield’s viral marketing plan:

ABZ3293.com: If you go frame by frame through the 1080p version of the Cloverfield trailer, right before the Statue of Liberty head incident, you might notice a black SUV with a license plate that reads ABZ 3293. See the photo at the top of this posting. The website features the following posting:

“I am in need of the driver of an SUV - New York Plate ABZ 3293
He has an item, that is considered a family heirloom.
If you know who this person is, or where I could find him please leave a comment.”

The post has over 207 comments at the time of this posting, so obviously people think this website is connected to the movie, but it isn’t. On the top right corner of the website’s design, you will find a bunch of links. The site claims that the linked websites linked to the ABZ website, but that isn’t true. The top link in this section and in the blog roll is to a 21 year old German student/ freelance web designer. My guess is that he could be the one responsible for this site. The other links appear to be obvious advertisements. Why would Paramount link a swing sets depot? Whomever set up this page is probably trying to raise the pagerank of these pages in Google. The domain name was also registered on July 10th 2007. Don’t you think that Paramount probably would have registered and created the websites that will be used in this viral web game before the trailer was released theatrically on July 2nd?

ParasiteMovie.com: Aside from the sad looking logo, badly cropped eyes from the Bad Robot logo and the countdown till the next Evan Haas message (which should be proof enough that the site is not legit), ParasiteMovie.com features a link to some free game website. If Paramount were running this website, they would not be trying to promote some lame badly designed online game website. It’s an obvious ploy to drive traffic to the game website. This site was also registered following the worldwide release of the movie trailer, on July 7th 2007.

Remember, as of right now, the only official Cloverfield websites are 1-18-08.com and Slusho.jp.

Arthur
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