Tech Tips - Recognizing a Hoax

By now, you have certainly been sent more than one e-mail that promises some special reward for forwarding it along to others. These, along with the dire warnings of terrorists and kidnappers, pleas for cards to be sent to terminally ill children, and warnings of new legislation that will bring an end to freedom as we know it have been duping people since the dawn of the internet. In fact, many of them pre-date e-mail, having been spread in print form before making their "digital" debut.

I could write pages upon pages about specific hoaxes and why they are not real, but many other websites have already done a very good job at this. Instead, I will try to focus on easy ways to identify a hoax and not be fooled by it. Most of the stories, warnings, and promises sent around have easily identifiable holes in them, but the rely on the blind trust of the general population, and the "what's the harm?" attitude of people who don't know how dangerous these can actually be.

Let's pause a minute and talk about the harm done. Aside from passing along your e-mail address and those of all your friends to potential spammers (See Also: Avoiding SPAM), these hoaxes, when mailed and re-mailed thousands and millions of times over, put a greater load on the Internet as a whole, which causes an increase in the costs of keeping the world network running. You may think that it costs you nothing to send that e-mail to all 300 people in your address book, but if everyone did that, it would have a cascading effect that would result in major upgrades to the network, which translate into higher costs for ISPs, which translate to more money for your service.

Secondly, and more importantly, there are people who act on these hoaxes, and can potentially do more harm than the hoax itself claims to prevent. When thousands of people send cards to a hospital for a sick kid who checked out of the hospital 15 years ago, someone has to deal with all that mail, and it costs time and money. When Christians send thousands of petitions to the government to stop phony legislation to remove "Touched by an Angel" from the air, it not only makes Christians look dumb and gullible, it costs our government time and money to deal with it, which translates to tax dollars. When non-technical people start deleting important system files from their computers because of a phony "virus" warning, they can damage their computers to the point that they will no longer boot up. And occasionally, there have been instances where a made-up crime story became true, because some sick person thought it was a clever idea.

But enough ranting about the damage - let's talk about identifying these hoaxes so we can hit the delete button.

Tip #1 - DON'T forward this to everyone you know

This one is a dead giveaway. When an e-mail says "forward this to everyone in your address book", there's about a 99.99% chance it's a hoax. The main goal of this type of e-mail is for the author to get a kick out of seeing how far it spreads and how many people will forward it on. There is some kind of thrill in knowing that something you made up has been read and believed by thousands, and even millions of people. Don't give them the satisfaction.

Tip #2 - Check for facts

So many e-mails that get passed around as a true story have absolutely no verifiable facts. No date, no City or State, no names of actual newspapers that reported the story or law enforcement agencies that were involved. They use phrases like "local school", "authorities", "local media", "experts", and often the subjects are simply referred to as "young lady" or "woman". It's a made up story. Just read, laugh, DELETE.

Tip #3 - If there are facts, verify them

Sometimes, hoax authors are clever enough to include a real name or a real city. If that's the case, it should be pretty easy to find some news about the event in question from a reputable news source on the internet. The World Wide Web is a powerful tool - use it to your advantage instead of being duped by it.