Did Hank Kunneman reveal a shocking prophecy that had to do with the Arizona audit or fraudulent votes? No, that's not true
Sep 24, 2021 by: Sarah Thompson
Did Hank Kunneman reveal a shocking prophecy that had to do with the Arizona audit or fraudulent votes? No, that's not true: This video's headline is an example of a clickbait tactic of a spam network that deceptively captures the attention of an American audience with headlines that bear little relation to the content of the video promoted.
This video shows a sermon by Pastor Hank Kunneman of Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska, but nowhere in this sermon does Kunneman mention anything about the presidential ballot audit in Maricopa County, Arizona. The video was lifted and given a misleading headline to entice viewers to stay tuned in. The page gets to share revenue from the ads that Facebook shows to the audience watching the video.
The misleading headline appears on a video published on Facebook by a page called "Flaherty's Honeoye Falls" on September 22, 2021, with this headline:
HANK KUNNEMAN SHOCKING PROPHECY ✅ REVEALED - AZ AUDIT, FRAUDULENT VOTES! ✅ PROPHECY SEP 22, 2021
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
t's not clear exactly how many people are involved in this spam network, but the tactics are repeated by many pages and also seen in posts in groups run by the same network. Many of the pages show connections to Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Many of the pages and profiles used in the network show signs that they were hacked or hijacked. Stealing an active account of a person or a business can be used to lend credibility to the foreign network's activity or to hide the network's origin.
Flaherty's Honeoye Falls is a restaurant in western New York state. They started this Facebook page on August 12, 2011. Shortly after they posted about Labor Day catering on September 3, 2021, the page was somehow taken over. On September 17, 2021, the page profile image was changed to a picture of Pastor Kent Christmas of Regeneration Nashville and the content of the page posts shifted from lunch specials to inspirational Christian memes.
Below are two screenshots to show how the theme of the content posted to the hijacked Facebook account has changed in the past weeks, with the more recent posts above. On the left are the page photos, and on the right are the videos. At the bottom are some original videos from years ago showing a "Breakfast with Santa" event at the restaurant. Now the page is posting videos with flashy tabloid thumbnails and political clickbait headlines which, like the Arizona audit teaser, misrepresent the video content.
Most of the content found in these spam networks hits political and QAnon themes. This portion of the spam network is using freebooted videos of sermons. These have been reworked with avatars in the corners, possibly to defeat AI recognition tools. Freebooting is a type of content piracy, taking someone else's content to use to make money without investing the time and production effort. This cuts out the original content creator from potential profits and growth of their audience. Some of the pastors whose content has appeared recycled on these network pages are
Kat Kerr, Hank Kunneman, Kent Christmas, Robin D. Bullock, Timothy Dixon, Deborah Williams and Amanda Grace.
Some of the foreign imposters are soliciting funds through the pages. Below is an example asking for page supporters from a page
called Kat Kerr Urgent and asking for donations from a page named Robin D. Bullock to a PayPal account with the Vietnamese name phamdung1102.
How to recognize foreign spam pages
The videos
The video thumbnails have bold tabloid-style graphics
When playing, animated avatar characters, narrators, animals or flags appear in the corners of the screen
The title text may include unusual type characters (homoglyphs)
The titles may include emojis or be completely in capitals
The videos may have been livestreamed even if they are old
Some videos are scheduled to stream as "events"
Poor production quality
Some videos are just podcast audio with animated human and animal avatars in the corners
A short video may repeat on a loop several times
Network activity
Video content is often used to promote a "join group" invitation
Group content is mostly posted by the same accounts
Group administration may have foreign profiles and use hacked accounts
Group content comes from the same handful of pages
Pages frequently are listed as "Gaming Video Creator"
The page transparency report on the account's home page
Page managers may be out of the U.S. but reaping ad revenue by attracting an American audience
Name of the page may have recently changed
Name of the page may not match the current content
Page may have been created very recently
Traces of former activity
Current photos and videos are often inconsistent with the earliest days of the page history
Not all the older content has been deleted
"Related Pages" sometimes give away clues that this page is one of several working the same vein
Lead Stories has written about these clickbait video spammers in the past: One page, DannLu, was taken from a Colombian pageant queen; another video claimed that it showed President Joe Biden crying at a press briefing.
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