The images showed a girl called Jenny holding up a whiteboard message to her former boss Spencer saying his "breath smells" and had demotivated staff.

The pictures quickly went viral with more than 360,000 "likes" on Facebook.

But after internet detectives started digging, the site hosting the images admitted the entire event was staged.

The Chive website posted a story on 9 August which contained 33 photographs of a woman calling herself Jenny holding up a whiteboard with a series of messages aimed at her boss, where she claimed he spent hours playing online games, sapped staff morale and that workers talked about him behind his back.