The Power Of The Hoax

You ever get one of those chain letter emails that tugs at your heart?

They usually involve a dying or seriously ill child, but close with some kind of odd request, like “If you want to make this child smile, forward this to as many people as possible…”.

Next thing you know, you’re actually doing it. You feel that if you DON’T, you don’t really deserve to live.

All of these hoaxes point to the same, lonely losers who originated them.

But don’t take MY word for it. There are a number of websites devoted to debunking these kinds of emails. The two best are:

http://www.sophos.com/security/hoaxes/

http://www.snopes.com

Should you receive such an email, do yourself a favor before forwarding it on to someone else: go to those sites and type in a related search query, or copy and paste a couple of sentences from the email in question, put it in quotations, and do a Google search.

(Copy and paste different lines, though. Not only one. Sometimes the message gets slightly skewed as it travels from person to person.)

I hope this made some sense. I’m really bloody tired…