That's not a valid comparison. As I understand it, the Pete London persona didn't advertise himself as looking for work - recruiters effectively started spamming him.
If someone created an entire fake company, and then laughed at engineers who tried to contact them to find out if they were hiring or not, that would probably not be very funny.
A bunch of people I grew up with created a website for a fake, unpaid media internship. It got several hundred applicants, including three people who tracked down one of the peoples phone number and called him, demanding an interview.
Happens all the time, e.g. with postings for positions that are really intended to be filled internally, or with perpetual postings which do nothing but solicit people to go into a resume pool when there is no specific job.
It wouldn't be funny because it's not even surprising for job searchers to be jerked around, just normal
There is a book "The Ax" about a laid off paper engineer who posts a fake job ad in order to see who his competition is. Then he kills them in order to increase his chances of getting a job.
