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| - A rumor shared online in early December 2024 said an Amazon seller received more than 100,000 orders for a green Luigi beanie — a product created in the name of the Mario-companion Nintendo character.
This claim circulated following the arrest of 26-year-old Luigi Nicholas Mangione, the man charged with several crimes, including murder, in the Dec. 4 fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan.
Users began discussing this matter on Dec. 9, not long after police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, arrested Mangione at a McDonald's restaurant earlier on the same day. Following Mangione's arrest, New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced his name at a news conference. Later on the same day, at a separate news conference, Lt. Col. George Bivens of the Pennsylvania State Police credited the arrest to a customer who alerted a McDonald's employee that Mangione was in the restaurant. That employee then called 911.
As a prime example of the rumor, on Dec. 9, a user on X shared (archived) an image of a purported post screenshot with the added text caption, "y'all are so unserious." The image showed the supposed Amazon listing with the product name, "Super Mario Bros Luigi Pom-Pom Knit Beanie Cap Green." It also displayed the name Bioworld (store) and a red circle around the words, "100,000+ bought today."
We further located other posts containing the same image on the AR15.com forums (archived) and Threads (archived).
However, the image showing an Amazon seller received more than 100,000 orders for the Luigi beanie was fake. We contacted the X user to ask about creating the image and will update this story if we receive a response.
The actual Amazon listing (archived) for the Luigi beanie displayed the words, "100+ bought in past month" — a far cry from the supposed "100,000+ bought today." In other words, a user altered a screenshot of the listing to add three zeros to the number "100."
The authentic Amazon listing displayed "100+ bought in past month"
In a private message on Amazon, Snopes asked the seller about the rumor. The seller listed the product under the brand Retrofacts on the Bioworld store. In response, an unidentified person speaking on behalf of the brand only said, "Well, there were only several hundred available earlier this week and there are still some in stock, so... Slight uptick perhaps, but these are mostly for people playing Mario Kart and Christmas gifts."
After exchanging these messages in the U.S. on the afternoon of Dec. 10, the listing for the product switched to displaying the status, "Currently unavailable."
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