Last week, I posted a video of "Sam," whose first dating video was chosen by Esquire as the worst on the Internet. "Sam" had been nice enough to give Correntewire a shoutout in one of his recent follow-up videos.

We're in the inconvenient-truth biz around here, so I must 'fess up to a convenient sin of omission.

You heard it here first, folks: Sam's a fake.

Well, he didn't start out as a fake. Remember the Thermians in Galaxy Quest, and how they thought the small-screen actors were real? It's kind of like that.

Except this time, instead of an adorable alien, the guileless one was Esquire.com writer Daniel Murphy, who unwittingly pilloried a fictitious character he found on a movie-promo MySpace page.

I'd feel a little empathy for the self-buffaloed writer, but I'm not sure empathy is his thing. Per Murphy, the kind of woman Sam might meet is "probably fat." And another of his failed-flirt five is, he says, "doing a rather serviceable impression of a man with a traumatic head injury."

So how did this misunderstanding-turned-hoax come about? How did a promo clip for a little-known movie become an internet phenomenon viewed over 75,000 times?

Here's how it happened: Read more…