Internet Hoaxes

Finding and Fighting Internet E-Mail Hoaxes

This article started in 2001 when another Internet hoax just found its way into my E-mail basket from a person I know. As a eighteen year resident of the Internet I have seen quite a few hoaxes, fables, odd tales, and outright lies, come through my various baskets. Once upon a time some were true, but are now about long dead events. Other have always been pure Fairy Tales. In the past I would occasionally be suckered into some of them, but now I know better and check things out first.

While the Internet makes it very easy to mass distribute a Hoax, it also makes it very quick and easy to check them out.

This document shows you how to quickly determine if you have received the junkiest of junk mail. When you receive rubbish mail, please send a reply back to your "friend" sending you the message. Pass back to them the fact the story is not true, a reference to how you know that (a web address should be suffcient), and perhaps more on how they to can join the anti-rubbish club (feel free to include the ENTIRE contents of this letter or point them to the URL of this letter).

Additional details on Internet Hoaxes may be found at a wonderful article at http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBHoaxInfo.html which goes into more details on this, and other, subjects.

Any E-mail that looks like spam is often treated by me as spam. This is to the point of deleting genuine E-mail. Make your subject lines specific enough to let people know the E-mail is not only from you, but mention a common link between the two of you that generic spammers will not know. "Minutes of Jan 14 Board meeting" rather than "Minutes".

Recognizing Possible Hoaxes

Any incoming E-mail that has one or more "hot points" in it trigger my brain's rumor guard. Any E-mail with any of the following points should be considered rumor until proven factual. Mail with two or more points is very likely to be "rubbish mail":

• E-mail requiring immediate action. This is especially true if there are no dates at all in the original E-mail text. Lack of expiration or completion dates on messages that obviously have such are almost a sure fire tip it is a rumor (public hearing dates, expiration dates for corporate offers, etc.)
• Messages asking you to pass this on to every one in your E-mail list. If it's enjoyable, just send it to those who would appreciate the subject. "Everyone you know" messages must be considered very suspect for nearly every subject. They can cost millions of dollars if they obtain any popularity at all, and can last for years. The first time its cute. Fifty times is annoying.
• Sharing information. Incoming messages sharing information saved on sites you never heard of. All it takes is one evil-site to give you many bad days.
• Messages insisting you must take some action.
• Articles without a "stop at" date. Articles asking to be forwarded, but which do not contain some type of "stop date" in them, must be considered very dubious.
• Articles that say they have been verified as true by various rumor control web sites.
• Articles involving politically hot issues.
• Stories that tug at your heartstrings. Sick kids asking for cards, lost children, and more.
• Scare stories... watch out for viruses in mail boxes, liver snatchers, gang violence, etc.
• Get rich quick ideas... many of these are outright illegal. If it includes the word "perfectly legal", likely it is not unless your lawyer type person says so. The "put your name on the bottom of the list and send money to the person on the top" are straight and illegal fraud. People doing this in the United States Postal system can be arrested. It's also mathematically impossible for them to work for all but the people near the start of the list.

  To get to number one on a ten-person list, assuming everyone receiving the message from the first sender sent to ten unique people, would hit 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) people at the end. Wow! If only 10% of the people sent one dollar to you you would have a cool billion dollars. However, there are about 300,000,000 (three-hundred million) people in the united states. Guess what?

  I suspect the people who start these lists put their name somewhere in the middle of the list, inventing the names around it.

• Articles that have been vigorously thrown from person to person by E-mail are always suspect, regardless of subject. All of those ">" arrows at the start of each line in the message are a dead give away as each ">" represents one throw through someone's E-mail basket.
• Some E-mail programs show vertical lines, often colored, in the left margin rather than ">" characters.
Whatever the different programs used, unless someone relaying the message it should be easy to spot.
• Too good to be true: any article offering something for far too little is likely a twisted tail offering little for much.

More often than these are tall tails rather than honest stories.

Tracking Down Hoaxes

Domain Research

Look at the site ownders

Is the site genuine? A great test is to go to Google and just type in the last two parts of the domain name (att.net rather than www.att.net). Stick a "whois" in front of the domain and you are good to go.

whois att.net

The first listing should be where you can go to get information on the domain name, it's owner, age, etc. If the site is new, don't trust it unless you personally know the owner. If the site is in places like China, India, old Soviet block countries, or other places with high incidences of fraud, really be wary.

Look at the different "top level" domain addresses associated with E-mail addresses, name servers, and anything else that shows up on the page. these are the last part of the names.... ".com", ".us", etc. If they are two letter codes they represent a specific country. If the owner is in one country, the web site in another, and the "name servers" yet another country, with postal addresses being strange as well, that is a very big red flag as evil people love to spread themselves over many legal jurisdictions to make prossicution more difficult, if not impossible. An alarm with fireworks.

Look at the site history

Try a suspect site in several web search engines (search for just the two right-most components. taggedmail.com, not www.taggedmail.com, and put it in quotes: "taggedmail.com"). Try at least both Google and Yahoo!.

If lots of problems are apparent, consider refraining from using the site.

Even if the site is run by genuine, legitimate, business people, if the site security is poor and is hijacked to the point of many compliants, then maybe you should not deal with it at all. If the site cleans itself up the problem reports will move further down the search response.

Internet Hoax Search Engines

Despite the urgency in the subject, most of these fables are not new. Some have been around since before there was an Internet. Thankfully the dedication of a few makes it easy to perform a reality check on incoming E-mail using the various sites that track, collect, and catalogue Internet hoaxes. I keep a list of such sites in my home pages at http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/.home.html (note it is dot home dot html) under Rumor Control Sites. My current favorites are:

http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

http://www.snopes.com/ Urban Legends Reference Pages

Both of these have hoax search engines. To use these search engines, search the suspect article for words that should be fairly unique to it and enter them into the search engine. Don't worry about making a sentence... you are doing an article search, not writing a letter to your aunt. In this case the key words were, The opening words of the hoax I received follows this message. Searching for "Klingerman Virus" was all that was required for positive test results. A link therein quickly took me to the official CDC disclaimer on this particular Internet fiction.

Even better... hoax search sites often say if the thing as real, providing enough information for you to decide if you want to keep playing the game or not.

For Urban Legens searches, Use google in the normal way with an extra word of, exactly, without other spaces or punctuation,

site:www.snopes.com

Advanced Hoax Testing

Naturally not all hoaxes are listed in the hoax search engines. If I can't get a positive match on any of them, I next go to the big search engines to search for keywords in the message. In general Google's advanced search at http://www.google.com/advanced_search provides a way to do this without strange use of quotes, "AND", "NOT", and other technical incantations.

Authors of these fictitious tails sometimes taint the names, addresses, and titles of real people at real institutions. If the name of a real institution is used, try and track it down on the official web pages. Next best is checking if the person has a home page that makes the statement, though that can not be considered official in most cases.

If there is a contact E-mail, but no web page to verify on, send the person an E-mail asking them if the informaion is still true. Include a suggestion for a web-page verifcation. Pointing them to this article may also help them. If the E-mail message bounces higher than the building you are in you know the original E-mail is bogus and may be discarded. (Anyone creating a "send this around" mailing that does not provide a web page verifcation is asking for trouble, so I don't worry about cluttering up their E-mail basket).

If your web searches turn up the fact that the article you are researching is years old, assume any facts in them are completely dead or expired, if not completely fictitious.

How To Write Genuine Requests For Help or Information

• Dateline: The date you first distribute the text should be included, at least once, in the text. Further the date should be included on the same line as important text of the article and not on a line by itself. When put on a line by itself it is guaranteed to be chopped off by some casual person forwarding the E-mail along who doesn't understand Internet Hoaxes.

  A date on the story also makes it more immediate to your readers, increasing the sense of urgency. A lack of serious dates in an article almost guarantees it is a hoax.
   

• In self Defense: if there is an expiration, or other "stop date", for some event described in your article, include that as well. At least twice. If you must ask the message to be forwared to all commers, include words something like "Please forward to all your friends until April 1, 2012" in the text to make this explicit when the text is to die. The date should be no more than a month or two a away. Without this you may be receiving replies from people for years. If the article gets widely distributed your E-mail basket may overflow for decades. In the event your subject does not have a natural expiration date, think about when you would be tired of receiving replies on the subject to create your own expiration date. Again, burry the stop date multiple places in the text so it is not left off or overlooked.
   
• Include some type of contact information... E-mail is one way. Perhaps the best of all is a web page where people can verify the article... this web page would contain the original text, along with any updates to it. A sample paragraph follows:

  Please distribute this information until April 2012. After that date the message should no longer be sent around. Until April 2012 you may verify this information is valid by visiting http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/bogus.html to see if the message is still current. The page contains the latest information on the subject. If this link does not work the message you are reading is obsolete and must be ignored.

  This message should be sandwiched between important paragraphs of the E-mail to help ensure it is not discarded by people repeating your message in hurry.

  When describing some official policy or statement of an institution, the information should be on the institution's official web server.
   

  Consider using a free E-mail account on one of the major providers for short term items. Close the account when you are done to let people who ignore your stop date get bounces in their E-mail boxes.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
	THE FOLLOWING IS A KNOWN HOAX..  DO NOT BELIEVE IT!

> > >> >
> > >> > > This is very scary and is not a joke. Please
> > read - it definitely is a
> > >> > > serious threat to our lives and health. This
> > is an alert about a virus
> > >> in
> > >> > >
> > >> > > the original sense of the word......one that
> > affects your body.....not
> > >> > > your
> > >> > > hard drive. There have been 23 confirmed
> > cases of people attacked by
> > >> the
> > >> > > Klingerman Virus; a virus that arrives in
> > your real mailbox, not in
> > >> your
> > >> > > e-mail in-box.
> > >> > >
> > >> > > Someone has been mailing large BLUE
> > envelopes, seemingly at random, to
> > >> > > people in the US and Canada. On the front of
> > the envelope in bold
> > >> black
> > >> > > letters is printed "A Gift For You From
> > >> > > The Klingerman Foundation."
	--- REST OF FABLE CUT TO SAVE SPACE ---

---

/ writings
	http://www.exit109.com/~ghealton/writings/InternetHoaxes.html
	Hits since 2002-09-10:	$Id: InternetHoaxes.hmac,v 1.10 2007/09/19 20:23:23 ghealton Exp ghealton $ Last formatted 2009-08-31 (Disclaimer)