An Instagram post claims an unidentified man was arrested for his creations in the video game Minecraft.

"Virginia man arrested for having Minecraft worlds that were exact replicas of classified US military bases," reads a screengrab of an apparent news headline in an Oct. 31 post.

The post accrued almost 30,000 likes in five days. 

The purported author of the article is Morgan Krakow, a general assignment reporter at the Anchorage Daily News. Other versions of the image on Facebook, which have accumulated thousands of shares, display the newspaper's banner at the top.

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But Krakow and editors at the Anchorage Daily News have said the headline is fake. There's no evidence the arrest described in the post occurred.

USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post for comment.

The Anchorage Daily News did not publish a story about a Minecraft-related arrest.

In an Oct. 28 Twitter thread, Krakow said she learned about the bogus article when a reporter reached out to her for a fact check. She said she didn't write the story.

"The fabricated story was weird: something about a guy who had been arrested after sharing exact replicas of classified military bases on Minecraft," she wrote in the thread. "The thing that left my feeling queasy – more than usual – is that it looked super real. Like, so real that I spent several minutes trying to make sure I didn't actually write it."

David Hulen, editor of the Anchorage Daily News, told fact-checkers from Reuters and Check Your Fact the story was "fabricated." Vicky Ho, deputy editor at the paper, confirmed in a tweet the picture was "not a real story published to our site."

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USA TODAY could find no evidence an arrest like the one described in the Instagram post actually happened.

Based on our research, we rate ALTERED a photo that claims to show a news story about a Virginia man who was arrested for having exact replicas of classified U.S. military bases in Minecraft. The image in the Instagram post suggests the Anchorage Daily News reported the story, but the purported author and two editors from the newspaper have debunked the claim.

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