This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
You may have read on the Internet that a big star is buying a summer home in Park City, Utah.
You may have read how the star — maybe it was Johnny Depp, or perhaps Justin Bieber — was "looking for a change" and "fell in love with the relaxed lifestyle" and "the tranquil beauty of the mountains."
If more than one of these stories popped up in your Facebook timeline, you might have noticed something strange. The repetition of the quotes was a giveaway — attributing the same exact words to both Depp and Bieber.
The stories are fakes, recurrences of a hoax that has been spreading across the Internet for the last couple weeks.
The website Snopes.com detailed the hoax in an article posted Friday — singling out fake-news sites McKenzie Post and Headline Brief as perpetrators of the phony stories (many of which are no longer accessible online).
Park City was one of many small towns across the country mentioned in the false stories, the Snopes investigators found. And Depp and Bieber weren't the only celebrities mentioned; the list included Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Matthew McConaughey and Taylor Swift.
Chalk it up as another reminder not to believe everything you read on the Internet.