Ship Your Enemies Glitter fooled us all by shipping enemies glitter. Wait, what?

When is a stunt not a stunt? Perhaps when you set up a website, take thousands of orders, process the majority, and then sell the site for $85,000

Mat Carpenter fooled us all. The 22-year-old Australian SEO expert and online marketer managed to convince the world's media that he had set up ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, a website which would package up glitter in an envelop and ship it to your enemies anywhere in the world for just AU$10

In fact, the whole thing was a stunt, Carpenter says. The joke is on us: all he actually did was set up a website, take more than 2,000 orders, ship out the majority of the packages, and then sell the site for $85,000 to a buyer who promises to fulfil the rest of the orders, as well as continue the website as a going concern.

Wait, hang on. What?

Perhaps it's time for the Guardian to come clean as well. This entire media organisation is an elaborate stunt. We tell people it's a news website, write and report news, sell adverts next to that news, and even print out tens of thousands of copies of the news each day, distributed to thousands of households and businesses (all for the low price of just 10 pounds a week), but rest assured, we're a stunt - and the real joke is on the lazy journalists who haven't noticed

Carpenter came clean in an interview with the New York Observer's Ryan Holiday.

"In what is now the Observer's second big exclusive on a media stunt that fooled nearly everyone in media, I was able to ask Mathew some questions about what happened, what he saw and what he learned and how this stunt came to be," Holiday writes. "I hope his answers provide some insight for readers on how the news works these days-but more importantly I hope it chastises increasingly lazy reporters"

But nowhere in the interview do either Carpenter or Holiday explain why any reporters should be chastised - except for one minor error Carpenter details, when "many outlets reported I was a student at a local university, which isn't true, and I have no idea how they came to that conclusion". Carpenter's only other explicit complaint is that one reporter was too rigorous in their fact-checking, demanding more evidence for his claims of millions of visitors than an easily faked screenshot

Instead, most reporters wrote some variation on a story which was emphatically true: that Carpenter had launched a website which would ship your enemies glitter for a low price. He did, and he has. The superbly written advertising copy on the website, another focus of a number of the stories, is not exactly a stunt either, though it is a good way of propelling a novelty product to viral fame

It's harder to tell whether Carpenter was playing puppetmaster by the time he decided to disable orders on his site and issue a plea on startup aggregator Product Hunt to "stop buying this horrible product". On the one hand, it's easier to hatch a diabolical plan if you aren't taking thousands of dollars for a product which you have a legal obligation to provide; on the other, the exasperation in Carpenter's requests to "stop", and the panicked emails sent to customers (including myself) warning that "there will be a bit of a delay with delivery times as the site somehow got popular", hint that the true story lies somewhere between Carpenter's new claims, and his old ones

Perhaps a budding SEO expert and online marketer, who decided to put his skills to the test by making his new business idea go viral, rapidly found himself overwhelmed by his success. Sensing the ability to cash out rather than deal with an increasingly "horrible product", he sells the site wholesale. And then, to save face, he reveals that that was his plan after all: he's not an incompetent start-up CEO, but a diabolical puppetmaster, pulling the press's strings from the start.

In a weired way, Carpenter's interview does make a point about journalists: the one thing we are more eager to write about than the lastest viral craze is a claim that the latest viral craze is a hoax

Take the lie that "Alex from Target" was a viral media stunt, which travelled almost as fast as the photo of the teen-dream 16-year-old himself, or the eternal chain of debunking and rebunking surrounding fad diets, carcinogen scares and alternative medicines.

Is the real glitter inside us all along? No, wait, that's stupid. It's in an envelope and on its way to my enemy, and I couldn't be happier

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