A millionaire cattle baron from northern Queensland has been caught up in an out-of-control internet hoax started by an American teenager.
For the past year, Dale Appleton has been bombarded daily with calls to his remote cattle station Bulliwallah and his mobile phone.
The calls are from concerned people who have read a heart-wrenching email supposedly written by the parents of a missing 15-year-old boy, Evan Trembley.
The email includes a photo of Evan who, it is written, disappeared two week ago.
"I am asking you all, begging you to please forward this email on to anyone and everyone you know," the email reads.
"If it was your child, you would want all the help you could get!!"
But the email is a fake, written in July last year as a joke by Evan Trembley himself, a Texas teen who put his details on a MySpace missing persons police alert and sent it to his friends.
The joke soon got out of hand and spread over the internet.
Unknown to Mr Appleton, someone then created an Australian version of the hoax, adding the farmer's home address and phone numbers to the email about the "missing" Evan Trembley.
Philip Spring, a station hand at Bulliwallah, said the Appleton family were fielding up to six calls a day about the email on their home phone alone.
"It does get pretty annoying, but I don’t think there is a lot they can do about it," Mr Spring told ninemsn.
Mr Spring said Mr Appleton did not know how his details had come to appear on the email.
"They have no idea who did it, or how it happened — it's all a mystery," he said.
Meanwhile, the real Evan, who put his family's own home phone number on the original hoax email, is also still getting calls.
Evan told US television network KGFX he was stunned at the way his prank had spiralled out of control.
"I just thought my friends would recognise it, get a laugh out of it," he said.
"Then people that weren't my friends took it seriously and went on with it from there."
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