On 12.23 I commented on a day-old documentary short by YouTube hotshot Josh Paler Lin that wound up getting loads of attention. It was about Lin laying $100 on a homeless guy named Thomas, and then following him to see what he’d do, and his camera covertly capturing Thomas hitting a liquor store — uh-oh — but using the $100 to buy food for other homeless people and then passing it around. The video goes on too long, but it had a nice little holiday-spirit vibe, and one result was that a lot of people donated cash to an Indiegogo campaign to help Thomas get a fresh start. (The current total is $135,000.) Except on 12.30 Vocativ‘s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh reported that the liquor-store purchase sequence was by all appearances staged. Taugan Tan Kadalim, a 26 year-old nursing student from Anaheim, tells Kavanaugh there’s “no way Thomas could have been secretly filmed—because he and Lin arrived at the liquor store in the same car. ‘The whole thing is bullshit,’ says Kadalim, who claims that on 12.20 he was outside the Euclid Liquor & Market, where the video’s pivotal scene is set. ‘Thomas knew he was being followed.’ Kadalim states. “[Lin] drove Thomas to the liquor store. While I think the guy is homeless, it is clear that from what I saw every part of that scene was staged.”