New York-based advertising company Silvercast Media has confirmed that the viral Shiba Inu Times Square ad was actually a fake.
The media firm says that it is just a rendering on its spectacular billboard located in the heart of Manhattan.
The screen covers a full city block on Broadway from 45th Street to 46th Street, attracting 1.5 million viewers per day.
As reported by U.Today, videos that purportedly show the digital billboard promoting the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency in the middle of Times Square went viral on Twitter on Sunday.
A tweet posted by U.S. Senate candidate Shannon Bray managed to collect over 5,500 likes.
There were multiple other jubilant tweets about the ad with thousands of likes on Twitter.
While meme cryptocurrencies of the likes of Dogecoin and Safemoon were indeed advertised in Times Square earlier this year, the Shiba Inu billboard is not real.
A user on popular gig platform Fiverr offers to add such visual effects for only $15.
In fact, the very same fake Times Square ad promoting Shiba Inu started circulating on Twitter in June.