A sensational photo of Hurricane Sandy circling the Statue of Liberty in New York City went viral on Monday ahead of the landfall of the storm. But don't be fooled, the NYC landscape photo is a fake.

According to myth-busting website Snopes.com, the photo is a phony and first emerged in September 2010 after a tornado in Brooklyn. The photo is actually a mashup of an ordinary photo of the Statue of Liberty with "storm-darkened skies over Nebraska."

The photo was first shared by Facebook user Jason Otts in Murphy, TX and has been reposted over 142,000 times.

"This is an amazing shot of New York today with the Frankenstorm bearing down. Nature is so powerful, yet so beautiful," Otts wrote.

Nature? Don't you mean Photoshop?

While you still have power, you can check out IBTimes' photo gallery of amazing -- and real -- images gathered from Instagram of Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricane Sandy is set to devastate many areas along East Coast this week as it makes its landfall sometime Monday. The nearly 1,000-mile storm, dubbed Frankenstorm for its Halloween arrival, is slated to down trees, cause massive flooding, power outages, damage buildings and trigger intense rainfall and snowfall at higher elevations.

Hurricane NYC