The Ladysmith Gazette played its role in spreading a totally FAKE story about changes to SASSA grant cards.

The story – which hinted that “The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) has introduced a new way of paying out child support funds, one that is similar to the food stamp card in the US” – was, according to Sassa’s Thomas Huma, totally false.

The original fake story was run on a website in September and a journalist trolling for interesting news stories spotted it.

Without proper fact-checking, the story was run.

The story was taken national by various newspapers.

We have since removed the story from our site and Facebook in an attempt to prevent the hoax news story from spreading further.

We unreservedly apologise to Sassa.