Don't Be Fooled By E-Mail Hoaxes

"There's a sucker born every minute"

With the advent of e-mail as a global communications tool, it did not take long for various aspects of some people's darker sides to shine through. Everyone is familiar with e-mail viruses: e-mails that contain a harmless looking attachment that is in reality a malicious program. Not everyone is familiar with the second cousin of e-mail viruses: e-mail hoaxes.

What is an E-Mail Hoax?
An e-mail hoax is simply a message that contains false information. The hoax may be relatively harmless, such as a story that urges you to pass it along to all of your friends in the far-fetched hopes of receiving a big fat cheque from a benevolent corporation. However, e-mail hoaxes can also be sinister, such as the e-mail that asks you to assist a relative of a high ranking official from some third world country to access lost millions. Or the e-mail hoax that urges you to delete an "infected" file from your computer that is actually valid and necessary.

How do they work?
E-mail hoaxes rely on the same tactic as e-mail viruses: it requires people to pass them along to their friends and colleagues, who in turn send it to their contacts, and so on. As such, it acts very much like a chain letter, and is based on the premise that people will tend to trust an e-mail that comes from a friend.

What is the harm of passing along a hoax?
Most people pass along hoaxes with this disclaimer "I do not know if this is real or not, but what's the harm in sending it along?"

E-mail hoaxes can cause a lot of harm - primarily to your reputation. By passing it along without first finding out if it is valid, you not only waste the time of your friend or colleague, but you also run the risk of demonstrating that you are either too busy to stop and read messages, or you simply don't know better. Passing along hoaxes can also land you and your friends on spam e-mail lists, resulting in a significant increase in the amount of junk e-mail you get.

E-mail hoaxes waste system resources and can have a very negative impact in the real world. There are charities who are flooded with thousands of useless letters every day, just because someone started a hoax e-mail urging people to send them things like business cards. Then gullible people passed along the hoax. Sometimes e-mail hoaxes also evolve to the point of where viruses are attached.

What can you do?
There is a simple rule to determine if an e-mail is a hoax or not: use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true... then it probably is. There is no corporation that will send you thousands of dollars for sending e-mail, nor is there an African princess who needs your help in laundering money.

If you get an e-mail that sounds plausible, investigate it before sending it along. There are a number of websites (some of which are listed below) that list all known hoaxes and their variants. It will only take a matter of seconds to find out if it is a hoax or not, and in the process, you will save yourself some possible embarrassment.

Links
Here are some links to additional information:

• Hoaxbusters
• Snopes
• Symantec (Norton) Hoax Information
• McAfee Hoax Page
• WEBtech's Article on Spam
• WEBtech's Article on Viruses
• WEBtech's Article on E-Mail Identity Theft
• WEBtech's Article on Malware