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While Boston went berserk, Philly just gave finger to ad boxes

Bidders are already offering hundreds of dollars for a chance to own pieces of an advertising campaign that gripped Boston with the fear of a possible terrorism attack and disrupted law enforcement in Philadelphia.

Bidders are already offering hundreds of dollars for a chance to own pieces of an advertising campaign that gripped Boston with the fear of a possible terrorism attack and disrupted law enforcement in Philadelphia.

Several electronic light boards advertising the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force, shown on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, were being sold on eBay soon after they had been mistaken for possible bombs in Boston on Wednesday.

The light boards - depicting "Mooninite," a recurring character on the show, with its middle finger raised - have led to the arrests in Boston of two men, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens. Police said they were hired by an advertising group for Turner Broadcasting System Inc., to place the signs in Boston.

In Philadelphia, officials say up to 56 of the light boards were placed around the city.

One appeared over the Footlocker store on South Street near 6th. Where the others were was not immediately known.

Mark Caezar, a manager at Elite Sports Shop, a skateboard store across the street from Footlocker, said he saw the ad almost a month ago.

"It looked like a Lite Brite," said Caezar, referring to the children's toy.

Caezar said he had started to notice stickers of the "Mooninite" character appearing around the city even earlier, and assumed it was being done by graffiti artists.

"I thought it was cool," said Caezar.

Philadelphia officials, however, did not.

After a cease-and-desist order was sent from the Department of Licenses and Inspections, Turner Broadcasting told Philadelphia officials the locations of the lightboards, according to city Managing Director Pedro Ramos.

Ramos said Turner Broadcasting could be fined up to $1,500 for each sign, which could total over $1 million.

As of last night, L&I had not recovered any of the signs, though the Philadelphia Joint Terrorism Task Force, composed of federal and local law-enforcement agencies, had been dispatched Wednesday night and took down at least three, Ramos said.

Though they did not react with the urgency that Boston officials did, Philadelphia officials were still not amused by the prank.

"If you are responding to false alarms, then you are risking taking resources away from actual emergencies, so we took it very seriously," said Ramos. *

Staff writer Mark McDonald and the Associated Press contributed to this report.