About those Clare Werbeloff hoax rumours...

In case you have been living under a rock, the so-called "Kings Cross bogan" Clare Werbeloff has become a full-blown internet sensation.

The 19-year-old Sydneysider's politically incorrect description of a shooting in Sydney's King Cross on Sunday morning has sparked a media firestorm of Corey Worthington proportions.

The story was always likely to mutate — but we here at ninemsn News were surprised to find ourselves caught up in a conspiracy theory today.

Justin Polites, of Starcom MediaVest Group, wrote a blog entry casting doubt on the authenticity of Clare's now infamous "fat wog, skinny wog" account of the shooting.

His blog post has since been followed up by influential media and marketing blog Mumbrella and passed around the Twittersphere.

Justin listed five reasons why Clare may not be the real deal — you can see them all here.

The basic gist is that marketing firm The Projects, which specialises in selling things to young people, may have planted Clare at the scene to give Toohey Extra Dry beer a push (an ad is visible in the background of the video).

He concludes that a call to ninemsn to determine the source of the video is needed "to help establish some truth".

We're happy to oblige — the source of the video was contract cameraman Greg Dulson, who was working the regular night shift for Nine News on Sunday morning.

Greg told us he didn't think there was anything rehearsed about Clare's performance.

"I think she came up to me and then I said 'Do you know what happened?' and she said 'Yes' and she just spontaneously came up with what you saw on the vision there," Greg said.

"I think she was a young girl that had had a few drinks… it wasn't a beat up.

"She didn't stand there [in front of the beer ad] specifically ... I framed it so that the police car was in the back [of the shot].

"You've got to understand that you're at a shooting, you're there to get the action at the time and usually get a grab afterwards."

Besides Greg's account, there are a few more reasons why this is one of the sillier conspiracy theories to do the rounds of the blogosphere.

It seems highly unlikely (as Mumbrella acknowledged) that The Projects could have reacted quickly enough to turn a random, late-night shooting into a marketing stunt.

Commenters on Mumbrella have also pointed out that this would be the most callous PR stunt ever conceived.

And when our reporter Jack Hawke first contacted Clare, she agreed to speak to us without an intermediary.

She didn't refer us to a PR agent and told us via Facebook that she was "loving" the attention.

It was only three hours later that she told us to contact her newly minted minder, who has since denied Clare being involved with any promotion.

So it seems the only sensible thing to do is put this ridiculous theory out of its misery. As Clare herself might say: "chk-chk, boom!"