The BottledKittens.com Hoax: Even WEIRDER than you thought.

If you were alive in the 90s, you probably remember when the “Bottled Kittens” website made the news. The website, BottledKittens.com, claimed to be selling living, miniature cats, in a variety of containers. The newspeople  lost it. There were think peices everywhere about the coming digital age and the disgusting morals of the lower class. The site was spread mostly by email. People got angry, then sent it to everyone they knew.

The site claimed that the cats were put in their containers at birth, so they could grow into the exact shape of the bottle or box.

One sub-page even claimed that the tub cats could actually be released, if you wanted a cube cat instead. I don’t remember any new stations reporting on that part. They probably only read the front page. Lazy.

The waves of angry people stopped rolling when indepentant journalist site, “batshitspotters.com”, pointed out while you could argue all day and night about whether cats can be jarred, that “Bottled Kittens LLC” did NOT exist, there was no external confirmation that any sale had ever occurred, and the images were obviously photoshopped. The site was clearly a hoax, if not outright parody!

So things settled down for “BottledKittens.com”. The site remained up, though. I remember showing it to some of my young relatives just after 2000. It became a curiosity of a begone era.

Then just last year, suddenly there was news about BottledKittens again! A rumor surfaced that the site had a secret backdoor interface which would allow coded messages to be sent, and orders for illicit drugs to be placed. The rumor got confirmed by a hacker known only to internet forums as “FourTwenty420”, who posted a video of themself, clicking on various points of the site, typing in a code, and then entering a chat window. The chatter on the other end immediately realized that FourTwenty420 wasn’t supposed to be there, and shut it down, but it was too late. The video was posted and the secret was out!

Public record shows that violent enforcers in Beldonac and even some SS agents up in Kuler-Naci looked into the site’s creation and managed to track it back to a company called VFD Pool and Spa. Any of you recognize that name? That’s right! It’s a known shell for the Shards, the gang known for illegal imports of big game and exotic animals in the early and mid-90s.

Turns out, it wasn’t drug front, it wasn’t a hoax, it wasn’t for importing bottled kittens either; it was a way for collectors to contact an ivory dealer.

The bottle kitten hoax was a RUSE to turn away suspicion from actual illegal animal trafficking!

BottledKittens.com is a archeological marvel from the first age of the internet, when people still believed in the authority of print. It’s a reminder not to take things at face value, to do our own research, check sources, follow citations, read the statistics, and remember that the powerful will leverage our base emotions to use us as their own propaganda machines.

This case was brought to our attention by one of our long-time listeners and fellow citizen journalists: a huge thanks to NudeWaffles for requesting we look into this one!