In another example of the vulnerability of search and social media to misinformation, a fake website has been exposed for misrepresenting the identity of the hero who disarmed one of the Bondi terrorists.

Capitalising on the viral video showing Ahmed al Ahmed wrenching a gun from one of the attackers, the fake news site purported to identify him as an Australian IT professional named Edward Crabtree and benefitted by many hits from people searching for news about the Bondi shootings.

The brazenly untrue ‘news report’ was published on the fake news site Daily Aus and purports to have an interview with the ‘hero’ that describes how he moved from Marrickville to Bondi and details of his fake career.

The reporter is named as Rebecca Chen, but this byline and other stories on the site change regularly.

The claim about the man’s name circulated widely on social media, and was picked up by X’s built-in AI tool, Grok, which repeated the misinformation when asked who the man was.

The full text of the fake news report is available here FAKE STORY_ Bondi Hero Edward Crabtree Disarms Terrorist – FAKE Daily AUS.

We have converted it to a pdf file for safety and put a warning on it, but have not linked to the URL directly because we do not want to send traffic to the fake site.

Reporting: Steve Ahern