To prevent a male Telegraph editor being too uncomfortable about pictures of sexually transmitted diseases, numerous phones suddenly began to bleep away.
Publishers are on the alert for false claims of cyber bullying after a young reader claiming to be a former student of Gloucester college posted the claim on Facebook.
Other reports from readers of the Australian metropolitan newspapers include complainants receiving phone calls from private numbers and extremely rude sales pitches.
In February, a writer for the community newspaper in Sydney, the Sutherland Shire, says she discovered someone was trying to identify her phone number and send a text message to her friends.
Publication has suggested a guess is the attackers would want the recipient to see the messages and then potentially unplug the device and restart it. This would then make a correction or stop the alarm.
A red-top tabloid in London has also been busy alerting readers to hoaxes in recent weeks.
Last week, a fake page on Twitter under the name of “Chantal Broom” claimed to be from a press release about the Sun and, most bizarrely, was saying that Kate Middleton and Prince William had the title Duchess of Hormone Ablation Repair.
Soon the page had been deleted and replaced with a screenshot of a similar account.
In January, a supposed account from “DAXG40” purporting to belong to a Sun editor sent a flurry of tweets calling out his Sun rivals. The @DAXG40 account said: “You aren’t the only newspaper page by page checking,” followed by several other negative tweets.
The account in some cases used personal details in tweets against the Daily Mirror’s Nick Knowles and Stephen Mulhern.
