06.21.07

Harry Potter Spoiler Hoax

Posted in Scoops at 2:28 pm by RavenclawWit

I had the misfortune yesterday of stumbling upon the infamous “spoiler” for Harry Potter Book 7 that has been making the rounds of the internet. Read more about it at The Leaky Cauldron.

I certainly won’t post the offending info here, but let me say after reading it that it’s almost certainly a hoax. The scenario posted by the “hacker”, as he/she is being referred to (due to their claim that they stole the book off a Bloomsbury computer), is so ridiculous that it’s almost definitely completely fabricated. Plus, it’s written like a spam email, full of misspellings, grammar mistakes, etc. They misspelled Voldemort. It’s clear that whoever posted it is not familiar with HP. Plus, if they were able to steal the entire book from Bloomsbury’s computer as they claim, then why wouldn’t they post the whole thing on the internet? There have been no reports of that.

Bloomsbury “declined comment on the hacker’s claims” and a a spokesperson for Scholastic warned readers “to be skeptical about anything on the Web that claims to have inside information on the book’s plot”. Some might ask why the publishers haven’t been more forceful in confirming or denying the spoiler, but they really can’t. For instance, the spoiler claims that several people die in book 7, and then goes on to describe (in very vague terms) how/why. What if, purely by accident, the hacker is right, and so-and-so does actually die in book 7? If the publishers confirm it, they’ve spoiled the book themselves for millions of readers, and if they deny it it makes them liars. On the other hand, if the spoiler is wrong (which I strongly suspect to be the case), and the publishers say so, then we would know that characters a and b, which according to the spoiler die in book 7, actually live, which is just as much of a spoiler for book 7 as telling us who dies. So the publishers have to kind of play it cool and neither confirm or deny the spoiler.

In any case, my encounter with the spoiler has made me decide that from now until July 21st, the only HP related sites that I’m going to read are HPANA, The Leaky Cauldron, and Mugglenet, because I know they’re responsible enough not to allow spoilers on their site.

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