Pranks Cause Havoc, Deaths

Enchiridion, Trojans Administrative District, Jupiter Space -- 1 Apr. 2057:  Another April Fools Day has come and gone, leaving in its wake plenty of chaos and destruction.  Among the highlights of this year's tomfoolery:

  • 14 high-frequency traders committed suicide by self-deletion when a spoofing campaign believed to be the work of Anonymous briefly replaced the InterPlan Index stock ticker broadcast with a false datastream showing a catastrophic market collapse.  A run of panic selling touched off by the prank destroyed several dozen credits worth of stock value before the Bureau of Market Stabilization's counterweight traders were able to step in.
  • A flash mob in Zion, organized by professional anti-religious-discrimination protesters in response to reports that the Trapezoid had voted to classify the Unorthodox Eschatological Chrislemite Bretheren as a proscribed hate group, ran riot and caused several centicredits worth of property damage.
  • A program which crawled social network profiles and sent several thousand anonymous e-mails to users claiming that their romantic partners were cheating on them with their best friends is believed to be directly responsible for hundreds of assaults and at least 3 murders.
  • A series of large explosions in the city of Saskatoon, Great Plains was caused by a misfire in a pyrotechnic setup which was designed by a local resident to convince neighbours that the city was under attack.  Emergency services at first refused to respond to reports of explosions, believing the reports to be a prank.  Several houses were destroyed by the resulting fire.

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