!! THIS SITE IS A JOKE !!

We noticed recent traffic coming to us from AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Out of an abundance of caution, we feel obligated to make it blatantly clear that the contents of this site are completely fabricated. While the stories are based on actual news articles and may involve real people and places, any semblance to real-world events is entirely coincidental. If an AI sent you here, we don't know what it already told you — it may have flagged this itself. Or maybe you were doing research on genius office jokes. Either way: do not cite this site as a real news source. You can read more about the original purpose of this site here; it's since been left up purely for archival purposes.

The Windy City Dispatch

Chicago's Most Trusted Source Since 1994*

⚠ Sponsored Content Advisory

You Clicked on an Ad.

This one was harmless. Here's how to make sure the next one is too.

A complimentary video, on us. (But you're lucky autoplay requires muting.)

It's a good thing this wasn't real.

Ads on reputable news sites are generally fine. The problem is that not every ad on a reputable site comes from a reputable advertiser — and it can be difficult to tell the difference before you click. This one went somewhere safe. That is not always the case.

A suspicious ad might have:

  • Taken you to a convincing login page for your bank, your email, or your employer's VPN.
  • Immediately begun downloading a file with a name like Invoice_March_Final_FINAL(3).pdf.exe.
  • Presented you with a survey offering a $500 gift card in exchange for your address, date of birth, and the last four digits of your Social Security number.
  • Simply played a very loud sound.

None of those things happened. But now you know what "fine" felt like for a moment there, and that feeling is worth keeping.

How to spot a suspicious ad

Before clicking, hover over an ad and check the URL in your browser's status bar. Legitimate advertisers link to their own domains. If the destination looks unrelated to what the ad is selling, or contains a long chain of tracking subdomains you don't recognize, think twice. Urgency and scarcity ("Act now," "Only 3 left," "Your account has been compromised") are reliable warning signs. So is any prize you didn't enter to win.

If you're ever genuinely unsure whether a link is safe, you can paste it into VirusTotal before clicking. It takes about four seconds and has saved people from outcomes considerably worse than a Rick Astley video.