On November 26, a "fraudulent" press release on PRWeb. com, and some other subsequent reports, announced the acquisition of public Wi-Fi vendor ICOA by Internet search giant Google, in a $400 million deal.

However, the `announcement' of ICOA's acquisition by Google soon turned out to be a fabricated story; with Google saying that the headlines were not true and that the company had not made the purported purchase of ICOA.

The denial of the acquisition reports by both Google and ICOA executives led most of the news sources, including Associated Press, which had picked up the news story without first verifying it, to either pull the story or amend it --- however, not before the penny stock shares had witnessed a brief jump from 1¢ to 5¢.

Interestingly, the story of the ICOA acquisition by Google started making rounds even despite the fact that the PRWeb. com press release was rather poorly written and had a number of grammatical errors. Apparently, the media picked the story because the ICOA purchase by Google made sense because Google hugely promotes Wi-Fi capabilities via its Chromebook, Android-based devices and its Android mobile OS.

About the false `acquisition' press release, ICOA's CEO George Strouthopoulos told CNET that the Wi-Fi firm has "never had any discussions with any potential acquirers,: and added: "Someone, I guess a stock promoter with a dubious interest, is disseminating wrong, false and misleading info in the PR circles. ICOA will report this to the proper authorities."