E-Mail This Article to a Friend HOAXING FOR DOLLARS Hunting for Bambi — and the facts BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

It seems like a classic example of America’s trashiest side: a Web site promotes an adult video in which louts fire paintballs at fleeing naked women, then both the site and video become so popular that their creators start selling the concept as a live-action game in the Vegas desert for $10,000 a pop. When Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS did an exposé on the game last week, the outcry was huge and instantaneous — with e-mails, phone calls, and letters pouring into city and county offices.

But almost immediately, urban hoax watchers like www.snopes.com declared the whole thing a scam. The Web site’s video seemed patently bogus in some aspects — including doctored photos of "mounted" women — and there was little evidence that a live hunt had ever occurred. KLAS’s rival news station, KVBC, did its own investigation to debunk the story.

In defensive mode, game creators David Krekelberg and Michael Burdick issued press releases to verify the original story, and Burdick appeared on talk shows like The O’Reilly Factor. They even produced a self-proclaimed paying-customer hunter, one George Evanthes of Las Vegas. KLAS, stinging from suggestions that it had been duped, tracked the e-commerce site handling the bookings and said it had evidence that a number of Web users had indeed plopped down the required $2500 deposit for upcoming hunts.

With public pressure mounting, Clark County officials announced that they were working with Las Vegas officials and even the Bureau of Land Management to look for possible code violations that might allow them to shut down Hunting for Bambi games.

But even as e-mail activists were calling for good citizens to bury Vegas in an organized cyber-protest, Evanthes’s friend John Albert stepped forward to say his buddy was helping to perpetrate a hoax. And then the Web site, www.huntingforbambi.com, itself seemingly disappeared. (Though it’s still up at Burdick’s other site, michaelb.zoovy.com)

So what’s the real scoop? When pressed, neither founder could verify an actual upcoming game date, nor could they produce any financial paper trail. No other hunter has stepped up to say he has booked a spot, and the Bambis listed on the site are escorts, whose same pictures and phone numbers are found on a variety of Vegas adult-entertainment Web sites. The odds clearly lean toward a promotional hoax.

But other questions remain. What kind of asshole makes a shoot-women-with-paint video in the first place? Does he have any clue how creepy it is to be the brain behind this twisted mix of adolescent thrills (what a mess dude, it’s like, paint), long-distance violence (I swear I didn’t even touch her!), and jack-off material? What kind of desperate sociopath then figured that his disturbing game needed tie-in products like T-shirts and ball caps? And who the hell buys them?

Even if no "real" Bambi hunts ever took (or take) place, the creators may still have scored some painfully palpable hits: the idea of violence against women has once again been reduced to a game, liberal good intentions have been manipulated to serve an empty cause, and a couple of bottom-feeders have made some cool cash the sleazy way. You see, those $2500 deposits are nonrefundable.