Anybody can get on twitter or facebook and claim a new record. ANYBODY. Until the pepper is tested and recognized by Guinness it's a wanna be. Simple as that.
Here's a bit of text that I copied from the CPI website that I thought quite pertinent at the moment.
Mark Twain famously said "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." The same can be said about the world's hottest chile pepper, it has been greatly exaggerated. The Chile Pepper Institute has had many inquiries about the Naga Viper and other chile peppers that claim to be the world's hottest chile pepper. The Chile Pepper Institute cannot confirm that the Naga Viper or any other chile pepper is the world's hottest, until unbiased, scientific replicated experiments have been done.
The Chile Pepper Institute is research based, and we base all of our information on this principal. What the Chile Pepper Institute can state is that the only extremely hot, commercially available chile pepper is the Bhut Jolokia. The Bhut Jolokia AVERAGED in replicated plots, 1,001,304 Scoville Heat Units. The Naga Viper was a single plant, and is not commercially available, nor has it been tested in replicated trials. To our knowledge, the heat of the Naga Viper was tested from a single plant; it has not been tested in replicated trials. Furthermore, seed of this plant is not commercially available.