The article I chose for my Break the Fake assignment was labeled “‘Thought I was going to die’: Man attacked by 20 otters during morning walk in Singapore park”. It was about a man named Graham George Spencer who was taking a morning walk when he was attacked by a family of otters. He later said that he got bit 26 times in 10 seconds, and was convinced he was going to die, murdered by adorable fuzzy mammals.

The first step is find the source, so I took to see if it was real was figuring out who wrote the article. I can see near the top that it was written by Devika Desai.

Then, for verify the source, I looked her up, and on MuckRack she was claimed to be a verified source. (What is MuckRack you ask? Correct Answer: I dunno.) The image is blurry for some reason, but you can see the green checkmark with the green writing next to her name, saying she’s verified.

Next, for using fact checking tools, I put the article in Snopes to see if it was there. It wasn’t, but it’s also a fairly recent article that may not have had time to be put into the website.

For the final step, check other sources, I looked up “Man attacked by 20 otters hoax”. There was no evidence of a hoax, but there were many articles that were about that specific topic, which makes me think that it was real information.

(It’s hard to read the image, but they all say things like “Man attacked by 20 otters: ‘I thought I was going to die'”, “‘Thought I was going to die’: Man attacked by 20 otters during morning walk”, “British man says ‘I thought I was going to die’ after he was attacked by OTTERS”, and “A man attacked by otters in Singapore got bitten 26 times”. They are all pretty similar, but different phrasing.)

My final conclusion is that, even though the article was not on scopes, I believe that it’s true. So next time you happen to be taking a walk in the morning in Singapore, watch out for our furry friends. They are, according to Mr. Spencer, quite lethal.

(the link to the article is here)