Back in the early-1990s, a group of college students thought it would be funny to make a rumor that the small German town of Bielefeld didn’t actually exist. Since then, the internet hoax has taken hold of the entire country and even Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has made jokes about it.

The story goes that the group of students took to the internet in 1994 to launch a conspiracy theory that claimed Bielefeld was actually a fake city made by the government or aliens to fool the German public. Even though the conspiracy is obviously false, there are about 340,000 people living there after all, Germans have kept it going for over two decades.

To perpetuate the myth, people commonly ask a series of questions like: “Do you know anyone from Bielefeld?” or “Have you ever been to Bielefeld?” Since the city isn’t a large tourist destination and has a relatively small population, very few people answer “yes” to these questions, which makes the hoax easily spreadable. The joke here is that Bielefeld is so nondescript and unknown that it doesn’t exist at all. Why they chose Bielefeld to pick on and not some other small town remains a mystery.

What makes this hoax unlike any other is that people across Germany have taken it upon themselves to keep it going. In the video above, you can see people answer questions about Bielefeld and all of them say it doesn’t exist or that they’ve never heard of it. The joke has even reached Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who in 2012 was ending a speech about an event in Bielefeld when she said she didn’t know if she was really there at all.

It seems that poor Bielefeld just can’t catch a break. But if it doesn’t exist, that wouldn’t really matter anyways.