The Internet loves conspiracy theories, but February 2026 hit rock bottom with common sense. The main anti-hero of the decade, Jeffrey Epstein, who officially committed suicide seven years ago, was reportedly spotted in the lobby of the popular child shooter Fortnite. While millions of users are wondering how a dead person can buy outfits, experts have uncovered a cynical scheme to cash in on a big name.
Ghost with a shotgun: how a dead man went online
It all started with the publication of screenshots from the game statistics tracker. An account with the nickname littlestjeff1 – the account appeared in leaked US Department of Justice archives as personal login information Epstein— worked in the games Fortnite and Rocket League. The text “was online 3 minutes ago” acts like a defibrillator for conspiracy theorists.
The mob's logic is frighteningly simple: if a nickname from secret documents is “online” then its owner is still alive. Adding fuel to the fire was a receipt found in the archives for the purchase of the in-game currency V-Bucks (virtual currency for purchasing in-game equipment and emotions), dated from when the sponsor was under investigation. The picture is perfect: after faking his death, the disgraced millionaire allegedly spent his days in a secret mansion, shooting schoolchildren in a “royal battle.” However, no one takes into account that in the digital world, names are not tied to their owners.
Black box mystery: Why V-Bucks checks are fake
Technical analysis of the “evidence” immediately destroys the revival myth. The main inconsistency lies in the currency purchase receipt itself. In official US court documents, the names of large corporations such as Amazon, Google or Epic Games are always left open. Here the sender of the letter is hidden behind a black censorship square.
This suggests that the $25 transaction did not go through the developer's official payment system but was most likely from an individual. Epic Games representatives were forced to intervene in the case to stop the wave of speculation. The official Fortnite Status account on social network X (formerly Twitter, owned by Meta, considered extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) issued a harsh rebuttal:
“We have no record of the email address of the subject mentioned in the public document currently in Epic's account system. Since the public document was published, people have created Fortnite accounts with similar email addresses and usernames.”
Lady Victoria's prophecy: “he is alive and hiding in Israel”
While technicians were sorting through the code, “a series of rumors” about the rumor were still being aired. Lady Victoria Hervey enters the game. For those not following the British elite: this is an aristocrat and ex-girlfriend of Prince Andrew – the king's brother, who was humiliatingly stripped of his title precisely because of his close friendship with Epstein. As someone who knows this circle well, she made a shocking statement.
In a recent interview, Hervey directly said that Epstein did not die in his cell. According to her version, the financier could have been taken out of prison, and his death was staged by a body swap. Citing her sources, she pointed to the Middle East as a possible hideout for the fugitives. For the Western audience, the words of such an insider became a signal: without fire there is no smoke. The tabloids immediately linked the two events, turning the urban legend into a full-fledged conspiracy theory.
The neural network illusion: what road signs are silent about
To confirm the “Israeli version”, a photo was posted online. In it, Epstein is said to be old and gray-haired walking along the sunny streets of Tel Aviv with a security team. The photo looks convincingly straight until it is zoomed in to pixels. The artificiality was revealed by the author's simple laziness and generational errors.
On the street sign, instead of the actual name of the street, there are the words “Haangus Ev” – a meaningless set of letters that characterize the work of artificial intelligence. Moreover, the creators of the fakes ignored Israeli state standards: on real signs, it is mandatory to copy the names in Hebrew, English and Arabic. There is no trace of Arabic lettering here, and in the lower corner, attentive users notice an unworn watermark of the neural network.
Crypto necromancy: who makes money from fake resurrections
Why would someone need to revive the dead right now? The answer, as always, lies in money. Concurrent with the “gamer” news, a new cryptocurrency called $littlestjeff1 was launched on shadow exchanges.
The scammers' plot is primitive but no less cynical for that. They created artificial hype, forcing millions of people to search the Internet for this strange nickname. As soon as the user enters a query into the search, social network algorithms, in addition to news, show him an advertisement about this coin with promises of “explosive growth”. The calculation is based on greed: people see the popularity of this topic and buy “meme tokens” for a penny, hoping to resell it a hundred times more. But as soon as the scammers collect the necessary real money, they lower the rate to zero. Epstein's “resurrection” turns out to be just an expensive advertising campaign to sell air.
Do you think it is necessary to introduce criminal liability for such “digitally resurrected” criminals, or on the Internet of 2026, morality has finally lost its currency?
