The fallacy of a false attribution occurs when an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased, or fabricated source in support of an argument.

A more deceptive and difficult to detect version of a false attribution is where a fraudulent advocate goes so far as to fabricate a source, such as creating a fake website, in order to support a claim. For example, the “Levitt Institute” was a fake organisation created in 2009 solely for the purposes of (successfully) fooling the Australian media into reporting that Sydney was Australia’s most naive city.