Hoaxes

[sscotty727]

All,

There are a number of hoaxes going around on the internet, especially in email. I just had one of our members here (no name will be mentioned) fall prank to one of these. Free money from Microsoft/AOL if you forward an email to everyone. This is debunked here. I pretty much live with the something for nothing is a scam or if "it's too good to be true" then it isn't.

Anyway, www.snopes.com is an excellent source for debunking rumors and hoaxes.

Scotty

[flavio]

I always knew a lot of hoaxes and just deleted them after receiving this kind of messages but someones are really impressive. I want to thanks sscotty727 for the link to snopes. What a wonderful work about all kinds of hoaxes and true information. Heels for all! Flavio.

[dr1819]

More than 99% of all e-mails promising blessings and good fortune if you forward the e-mail to more than one person (and bad luck/fortune if you "break the chain") are utter, pure hoaxes, regardless of how well they're written. Their sole design is to clog up e-mail servers something fierce, and they do an excellent job! Let's say someone sends you an inspiring e-mail, encouraging you to pass it along to your best friend, and so on. It'll usually go an average of three hopes - that's between 5 and 10 people before dying out. But the good fortune/bad luck e-mails go an average of 7 hops, with an average of 3 people per hop, for a total of 21 folks. That's for every original recipient, which can number in the hundreds of thousands. So, just by sending one e-mail, the sender has stressed the system by a factor of 21. Personally, I think it's the men in the black hats "dredging the canals," so to speak, figuring out ways to force ISPs to keep their pipes open wide so that real traffic can get through when necessary, as well as to minimize the liklihood that similar enemy activity will bring the Internet to a crawl.