It's all a big hoax of course. True 'Future' fans know the date is 21 October 2015.

Nonetheless, the pic of the iconic dashboard was shared thousands of times, and even trended on Twitter. Fans were still excitedly posting the pic overnight, even though the date mentioned was, of course, at that time almost two days ago.

Among those duped were 'Being Human' actor Russell Tovey and 'Inception' star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who tweeted to his followers 'Happy Future Day, Ladies and Gentlemen!' with a link to the pic (which has now been taken down).

The bogus photo was first posted on the Facebook page of mobile checkout provider Simply Tap, before it was picked up by craft company Colour Me Fun. The man behind the image was Steve Berry, a social media manager for Simply Tap.

He created the image to plug the upcoming 'Back To The Future' Blu-ray box set, and told Mashable he assumed folks would know it was a fake because there was a similar hoax back in 2010 that also went viral (after it was started by Total Film).

He said: "We promoted the image fully confident in the knowledge that everyone was familiar with the original hoax from a couple of years ago.

"We figured that no one would fall for the same joke twice, so the caption was deliberately replicated word for word so people would get the reference."

How wrong he was.

Orlando Parfitt writes for Yahoo! Movies UK & IE