Chicken nugget thief's post was all a hoax

John Correa, 18, said the Twitter post claiming he grabbed frozen chicken nuggets on his last day at Burger King was all a hoax. (Burger King)

A Florida teen that became an Internet sensation after claiming he stole all the chicken nuggets from Burger King on his last day on the job says it was all a hoax.

John Correa, 18, who goes by Zealot on Twitter, posted a picture to his feed earlier this week that showed a couple of bags of the frozen chicken nuggets in the passenger seat of his car, snuggly strapped in with a seatbelt for safety. He wrote, "TODAY WAS MY LAST DAY WORKING AT BURGER KING SO I TOOK ALL OF THEIR NUGGETS, F*** IT."

Many news sites, including Mashable, picked up the story.

But Correa was only running an errand for his boss and posted the nuggets to see how easily people will believe anything they see on social media, according to WPLG.  Turns out his experiment worked.

His post garnered praise for being “The Chicken King” and suggested that he was a “hero” for fight obesity, among other things. Correa says despite his post having 40,000 retweets before he deleted his entire Twitter thread, only two media outlets contacted him to verify the story: BuzzFeed and WPLG in Florida.

Other than those two, “Nobody contacted me to see if it was true or not,” he said.

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Correa told BuzzFeed that he still works at Burger King, but hopes to leave in a few weeks as he has another job lined up.