A few days ago, Google released a statement saying that the company was purchasing public Wi-Fi provider ICOA for $400 million. For the next 2 hours that story seemed to be true. The matter is that the press release in question was posted on this wire, but when hacks came to follow up the release, they suddenly discovered that the company executives denied the fact.

According to ICOA’s CEO George Strouthopoulos, his company had never held any negotiations with any potential acquirers. He believes that the speculations were put out by a stock promoter who had a dubious interest. The promoter was spreading wrong, false and misleading information in the PR circles, and George Strouthopoulos assured that he had already reported this to the proper authorities.

In the meanwhile, ICOA’s services power Wi-Fi hotspots at various public locations like airports and restaurants. In addition, the company is also big on “back office solutions” for hotspot operators and wireless service providers. Overall, ICOA owns Wi-Fi installations in thirty states.

According to the press release, Google was happy about the deal in question. The author suggested that Google was looking forward to further diversifying its already impressive portfolio of companies. However, hacks who ran the story didn’t even notice that there were a lot of typos in it.

Overall, the entire story looks like a hoax, because Google was known to be interested in Wi-Fi infrastructure earlier and even has been connecting homes in Kansas City to its Google Fiber broadband network. One may fairly suggest that adding more networks could boost the giant’s ability to do all that.