A clubber who said he accidentally ended up in Syria following a night out with his mates while on holiday in Cyprus has admitted that he made it all up.
Lewis Ellis, 25, from Manchester , claimed he ended up in the war-torn country with pals Alex McCormick, 19, and James Wallman, 23 after a night out in Ayia Napa.
They had claimed the group boarded what they thought was a dolphin-watching boat.
But the club reps said they were met by baffled Russian military police in Tartus - just 50 miles from the battle-scarred city of Homs.
However Lewis, who has a YouTube channel dedicated to internet pranks, has now told pals on Facebook that he made the story up.
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Lewis, who was previously filmed going for a swim in the pool at Manchester's Trafford Centre food court, replued to a friend on Facebook: “Hahaha what a prank."
The friend replied with: “So u didn’t get on wrong boat.”
To which Lewis said: “Naaa we just made it up for fun."
Known as LostBoyLewis on his YouTube channel, the 25-year-old admits to enjoying being "childish" and wanting to have fun.
He said: "The idea of this channel is just being childish .
"The name Lost Boy Lewis is obviously because the Lost Boys are Peter Pan who never grew up and they always stayed young.
"It’s going to be about being childish and about having as much fun as physically possible."
Under one of his videos, he replied to a follower four months ago saying; “I dunno how to keep in the news but I’ll do something big soon and see if it gains traction."
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Speaking last night about his false story, which has now been published by news sites across the world, Lewis claimed: "The last club closed at 7.30am so we just powered through to our 9am boat trip and ended up blagging our way onto the wrong boat.
"We were wearing boardshorts, hungover, looking like we were ready for a boat party.
"Everyone was foreign and it was pretty much half way out from the island when we asked 'how come we're so far away from land?'"
Alex added: "We got pretty far out and at that point we were looking at each other thinking 'what the f*** do we do now?'.
"We were panicking and saying to these guys 'you need to turn around'.
"After hours and hours we turned up in this place and we were like 'what the f***, where are we?"
Watch: Lewis going for a swim at the Trafford Centre
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The trio said they were told to stay on the boat at first before being driven into a Russian military base.
They claim they still had no clue where they were until one of them was able to post on Facebook and the app revealed their location.
Alex added: "Eventually we found a translator and when we told him he just fell about laughing.
"We hung round in their quarters and they took pictures of us before we could get the boat back."
