US netizens, media crack Fil-Am's viral 'fabrication'

MANILA, Philippines — A Filipino marketer living in Los Angeles convinced a few but irked many when he claimed his tech company, Breakr Nation, is behind the meme #AlexFromTarget.

Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, founder of the company that claims to connect "fans with their fandom," took credit for the fame of Alex Lee, a bagging clerk at retail giant Target, who became an online sensation a few hours after his photo circulated on Twitter earlier this month.

On November 2, a teenage girl Abbie (@auscalum) posted a candid photo of 16-year-old Lee and stirred up "fan girls" across America and the world.

Before long, Leonares' startup company said on LinkedIn that it was one of its "social media experiments."

"We wanted to see how powerful the fangirl demographic was by taking an unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral internet sensation. Abbie (@auscalum), one of our fangirls from Kensington, UK posted this picture of Alex Lee (@acl163) on Twitter," Leonares said.

What followed was a flood of comments from Internet experts and marketers on the professional networking site as well as on online magazines slamming Leonares for the "utter rubbish."

"I'm not buying the bus," a LinkedIn member said.

Another challenged him to provide proof that Leonares' network of fan girls made Lee a phenomenon.

"Not a single name is mentioned here of a person who has been a part of this and who has accepted any association with your company," another user said.

Lee, his family and Abbie all denied connection with Breakr.

"Apparently there is a company trying to take credit for how the pic taken of me went viral,

My family and I have never heard of this company.

— Alex Lee (@acl163) November 5, 2014

i dont work for breakr wtf i dont even know what it is

— ? (@auscalum) November 4, 2014

Abbie also said she was not the one who first posted the photo on the Web. Alanna Page, another teenager, took the photo and uploaded it on her Tumblr account, identifying the "cute" guy only as Alex from Target based on his name tag.

The New York Times, meanwhile, wrote a profile of Lee on November 12, saying that attempts to take credit for his fame is among the consequences of web fame.

Popular curation site BuzzFeed interviewed Leonares and other supposed members of his Breakr network, who subsequently denied collaborating with the entrepreneur. - Camille Diola