If there is one cardinal rule of the Internet, it's "look before you share."
Some people learned this rule the hard way over the last week when they encountered evil genius and master troll Stephen Roseman, who shared a picture on Facebook of a dog with a caption: "This poor dog was badly burned and disfigured trying to save his family from a house fire. One like = one prayer. One share = ten prayers."
Of course, if you look at it closely (or even, not that closely) you will see that this picture is just a dog with a slice of ham on its face. We've been duped, Internet.
Some people were quick to offer their prayers and nice thoughts for the brave, ham-faced dog, thinking it had suffered a horrible fire in service of his humans.
Others were quick to point out that the dog was clearly just sitting patiently for the slice of lunch meat to be removed from his face (and ideally put in his mouth).
Some even got angry with Roseman's trolling, and accused him of making threats to people who didn't share the post.
Roseman claimed in the post that the dog in the picture is not his dog. He actually found the picture on Facebook and reposted it. He also said that he posted it to make fun of people who write similar posts, writing, "tup, this is a mockery and I did it all for teh LuLz!"
People are still sharing the post, and while Hamdog is still definitely a hero in all our eyes, not everyone has clued into the fact that he's just a regular dog waiting for a treat.