Google Earth rescuing British woman story 'spectacularly fake'

A story about a British woman being rescued from a desert island via Google Earth images, which is being widely shared on social media is reportedly fake.

The amazing story of Gemma Sheridan saved by Google Earth after seven years stranded on a desert island has gone viral on Twitter, despite being visibly fake.

According to the Independent, the story, posted first on News-Hound.org, claims that Sheridan and her two friends had embarked on a voyage to Hawaii when they met bad weather, damaging the boat and knocking her unconscious.

The woman woke up to find herself on the beach of a remote island and then apparently spent seven years carving out a difficult survival before an SOS sign she made was spotted on Google Earth satellite images by 'some kid from Minnesota', at which point she was saved.

However, the story shared widely on Twitter, with hashtags like '#truestory,' is clearly a hoax, as revealed by rumour-debunking website Waffles at Noon.

It pointed that the alleged Google Earth picture of the island and its SOS message originally comes from a 2010 Amnesty International report on violence in Kyrgyzstan, while the details of Sheridan's survival are not only fake, but they are plagiarized, with huge chunks taken from a report into a Pacific island survival exercise undertaken by the explorer Ed Stafford.

The website News-Hound.org reportedly itself has a history of posting outlandish stories and has put up articles which appear to pre-date the site's own registration earlier this year, the report added.