A viral ex-kickboxer and social media influencer Andrew Tate is back in the headlines once more and this time, he is being targeted by a death hoax on social media. 

For the last few weeks, Tate has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First, he picked a beef with climate activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter. The back and forth between them included a video from his end, which resulted in Romanian authorities raiding his house in Romania and arresting him and his brother for alleged human trafficking. 

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The recent death hoax was conjured up by British journalist Piers Morgan’s Twitter account after it was reportedly hacked just days before the Tate brothers were arrested. “BREAKING NEWS: Andrew Tate has been found shot dead in Dubai,” a tweet from his account said.

However, Andrew is alive and well, as videos of his arrest went viral on social media. Speculation about his passing circulated on the internet after Morgan’s Twitter account announced the hoax news on December 27. According to sources, over 4.6 million Twitter users read the tweet, which made quite a buzz on the internet. 

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The 36-year-old influencer has appeared three times on Piers Morgan’s show. The two appear to have built a unique friendship. In fact, even Tate retweeted the fake tweet, assuring his fans that he was “hard to kill.”

An investigation has found that the Tate brothers allegedly kept six women “like prisoners” to take part in pornographic videos for online consumption. The Tate brother has since been placed behind bars and was to remain there for thirty days.

The police found that the Tate brothers recruited, coerced, and exploited the woman into “forced labor and p*rnographic acts with a view to producing and disseminating such material” “to obtain substantial financial benefits.”