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Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke July 5, 2024

No, this isn’t a real McDonald’s billboard recruiting ‘crypto bro’s’

If Your Time is short

  • This image was altered. This isn’t an authentic photo of a McDonald’s billboard.

McDonald’s didn’t suggest that men who work in cryptocurrency would be lovin’ a career in fast food instead, but a supposed photo of a McDonald’s billboard is again spreading on social media. 

"Hey crypto bro’s we are hiring," reads the text replete with a misplaced apostrophe in what looks like a McDonald’s billboard. The image features McDonald’s red and yellow colors and a URL for McDonald’s careers page

A Threads post sharing this image was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

McDonald’s didn’t immediately respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the image. But as Snopes reported in 2022, this claim has been circulating since 2021, when several cryptocurrencies saw their values plummet.

Featured Fact-check

A reverse-image search of the supposed billboard led us to a November 2009 Flickr post from a Poland-based photographer who identified the location as Warsaw. The billboard in this image advertises a Hyundai car — not McDonald’s. 

We found other instances of the same image being altered to replace the Hyundai advertisement with personal photos. 

What we didn’t find: Any credible sources to corroborate claims that this is a real McDonald’s billboard.

We rate claims that this image shows an authentic McDonald’s billboard False.

 

Our Sources

Threads post, July 4, 2024

Flickr post, Oct. 14, 2012

Facebook account, visited July 5, 2024

Reddit post, Nov. 29, 2021

Flickr post, Nov. 16, 2009

 

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No, this isn’t a real McDonald’s billboard recruiting ‘crypto bro’s’

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