No, Tom Cruise is NOT Moving to South Queensferry, Scotland

The claims in the report are false. Tom Cruise has not announced any intention to move to Scotland. The hoax comes from a fake-news site that publishes a series of nonsensical reports about celebrities. This version is just one of a host of recent stories that have falsely claimed that high profile celebrities have announced sudden and unexpected moves to various locations around the world.

According to a report that is currently making its way around the interwebs via social media shares and blog posts, actor Tom Cruise has announced that he is moving to South Queensferry, a small town near Edinburgh, Scotland. The report claims that Cruise has grown ‘tired of the Hollywood lifestyle’ and decided to move to the little town after he visited it while scouting for a film location. The report notes that the proposed move has come as a major surprise to ‘everyone in Hollywood’.

But, the claims in the report are untrue. Tom Cruise has made no such announcement and there are no credible news or entertainment references that support the claims made in the report.

In fact, the story is a work of fiction that comes from a clickbait fake-news website called ‘Headline Brief’. The site’s Contact Us page includes the following disclaimer:

Headline Brief is a fantasy news site. All news articles on headlinebrief.com are satire or pure fantasy.

This story is just one among a spate of recent hoax reports that have falsely claimed that a particular celebrity is moving to an unexpected and out of the way location. Alternative versions of the same ‘move announcement’ reports have featuring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Justin Bieber, Clint Eastwood, Taylor Swift, and several others stars. Many of the stories have been published on another fake-news website called ‘The Mckenzie Post’. ‘Headline Brief’ and ‘The Mckenzie Post’ use very similar formats and include the identical disclaimer.

The Internet and social media are awash with this sort of pseudo-satirical nonsense. These websites generally present their stories in news format and bury their disclaimers in places where most visitors will not see them. Thus, many people are apt to take the reports seriously and share them in good faith.

It is wise to verify any strange or unusual story that comes your way before you share it with others. Searching a news portal such as Google News will usually reveal if a circulating story is true.