The Daily Mail reported today that a high school teacher in Santiago del Estero, Argentina had been suspended after sleeping with a 16-year-old student who made a sex tape and leaked it to his friends. The story has been going viral on Spanish-language news sites since last week. It's (mostly) fake. Let us explain.

According to the viral story, Lucita Sandoval, a 26-year-old (or 35-year-old, depending on the source) English teacher had previously faced as many as 5 disciplinary hearings over her relationships with students. Some sources even reported Sandoval had been arrested.

The alleged 23-minute tape, which shows the young man giving a thumbs up to the camera, was reportedly the first real evidence against her. The video went viral and appeared on porn sites (NSFW) after the boy, instead of deleting it as promised, supposedly shared it with his friends via WhatsApp.

"Lucita Sandoval" has since become an infamous internet celebrity, with several fake Facebook profiles dedicated to her, featuring dozens of photos.

But an investigation by local Santiago del Estero paper Nuevo Diario, published nearly a week before the sex tape went viral in Latin America, and almost 2 weeks before English-language tabloids took the story worldwide, claims most of her story is just viral bullshit.

The sex tape exists, but doesn't show a teacher and an underage boy. A Nuevo Diario reader was Facebook friends with a woman who appears to be the star of the video, and alerted the paper to her profile. According to an expert, "There are marks on the skin , beyond the nearly exact similarities between the [Facebook] photographs and the analyzed frames [of the sex tape] that are almost impossible to replicate in position, shape and depth in two similar people."

Although she did go to school to teach English, the woman in the video isn't a teacher in Santiago del Estero. She's actually from a different city, Corrientes. Following the trail from her profile, they also tracked down the man in the video, who isn't an underage student. His Facebook profile says he's in college.

The alleged student-teacher sex video seems to be a private sex tape that was shared via Whatsapp and then uploaded to a porn site. Nuevo Diario believes the original source was an Xvideos user named Metatron1980, who posted two videos on Sept. 8. with the title "puta correntina." Neither one is 23 minutes long.

The last remaining mystery, Nuevo Diario reports, is how the video made it to Santiago del Estero's local Whatsapp network and had the "teacher" rumor attached to it.

[h/t Daily Mail, Photo: Facebook]