I wasn’t even going to write about this until I nearly fell out of my chair laughing as I saw that it’s now an international story.

If you prefer video, click here for the Euronews report (in English) or click here for the TVR report (in Romanian).

If you prefer print, here’s Mediafax, here’s Adevarul, here’s Wall Street (Romanian), here’s Ziare.com, here’s Transilvania Reporter (with their own unique headline) and there are dozens of others, with every single major (and most of the minor) Romanian news outlets covering this story. Hell, even Agerpress, the official Romanian government news agency, reported it.

They all say the exact same thing: on Tuesday, April 8, the International Day of Gypsies, a group of wealthy gypsy businessmen launched a television channel in Cluj-Napoca for gypsies. The channel will focus on gypsy culture and will most of the presenters will be ethnic gypsy students of Cluj’s UBB university’s journalism program.

Aurel Pascu (a wealthy gypsy businessman) said that he invested 40,000 euros to get the channel started, which is called “Romanian Gipsy Reality”. He also stated that while they’re not ready to broadcast over the air (or via cable/satellite) they are now streaming their channel over the internet.

The only problem is absolutely none of this is true. That’s why I was laughing so hard.

It is true that Aurel Pascu and some other gypsies gave a press conference and said all of the things above but not one single journalist ever bothered to verify it. They all reported on it and then failed to give a link to the “new television channel” for a good reason: on April 8 (the day of the press conference), there was no website and thus no channel to be streamed.

Two days later, they did manage to get a shitty website put up on the web but guess what? Not a single “episode” of any of their supposed television broadcasts is online, only a “radio” player that streams a few mp3s and some hilarious links (the most recent of which is from 2012) to articles about gypsies in the international media.

Yep, looks like the gypsies once again tricked the world because everyone was so eager to believe that they were now “making progress” that the media reprinted every word they said without even bothering to do the most basic investigation into these so-called “facts”.

Remember that the next time the media purports to tell you what’s going on in the world, because 99.9% of the time they’re just repeating what they were told. Whether or not a gypsy television station exists isn’t that big of a deal but sometimes those lies really matter.

For the record, Dorin Cioaba, the King of all Gypsies, also once announced (in November 2013) that he too was launching a gypsy television channel (named IRU-TV) that never ended up actually happening.

Therefore this week’s announcement of a gypsy TV channel launch is actually the second time that gypsies have punked Romanian journalists with the same “bit”, which is pretty hilarious in its own right.