Our Top Ten Persistent Internet Hoaxes That Just Won’t Die! 2009 List
Internet hoaxes come and go everyday. The majority have their heyday and disappear as suddenly as they arrived, but there are those unrelenting hoaxes that just keep continually popping up over and over again, with only a little alteration or variation. Here we list our top ten hoaxes that just won’t die!
10. The Celebrity Death
Type: Email Media Hoax
What the creators of these pointless email rumours are trying to accomplish is anybody’s guess, but some do get international attention. For some strange reason, a popular method of fake death is falling of a cliff whilst filming a movie in New Zealand, a manner which has “claimed” the likes of Tom Cruise and Jeff Goldblum more than once. Other popular accidents include drug overdoses and car accidents. Other celebrities that have “died” include Eminem, Harrison Ford, Miley Cyrus, Natalie Portman and Sinbad. Why these rumours get so much recognition is beyond us. If you do hear a rumour like this, we would recommend checking a popular online news service like CNN or BBC – not hard to do and can stop you from unwittingly perpetuating a hoax. However, for now, I guess we’ll just have to wait to see who the next celebrity is to die a “cyberspace” death.
9. The Nigerian Government Wants our Money!
Type: Advanced Fee Fraud
You would think the premise of these stories would have changed by now, but no, they’re still hanging around like a bad smell, continually popping up in our inboxes with some minor modification, a poor attempt of disguising the email from the last obvious hoax received prior. All the emails claim the Nigerian (or other African nation) government is trying to get hold of a fortune left behind by a dead businessman | dead politician | dead politicians family. Of course the person emailing you needs to get the money to a foreign bank account – namely yours – for it to be safe. Then of course you can split it with your new Nigerian friend. Why the person emailing you doesn’t know anybody at all outside their country conveniently goes unexplained but this template has been doing the rounds for years now, with only minor alterations to make it appear new.
Why people have not learnt that wiring money to Nigerian bankers is practically the same as giving your wallet to a hobo for safekeeping is frankly a mystery, but these Nigerian government corrupt scams do still have a good margin of success.
8. Posting Links with Google
Type: Misc
These just will not go away, every few months a new way of getting rich quick pops up – well actually it’s the SAME way, just a different name. Posting links with Google and making money has almost gone into urban legend status as its been a hot subject for so long. From the Easy Google Cash Kit and Google Fortune to Google Money Tree and Easy Google Profits – its all the same tripe with a different name. Identical even down to the unethical marketing using either fake newspaper advertisements to the blatantly fake “success stories” – even the fabricated endorsements from ABC and CNN are the same for all the variants. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – the only 2 products Google own are Adwords and Adsense. Nothing else. Avoid anything else that uses the Google name.
7. Send This Email and Receive a Prize
Type: You Send, We Track Hoax
Now we have said multiple times, this age old truth – you cannot track emails, so when a company claims to send you a gift of some sort when you forward this to X amount of your email contacts, we know that you know you can put this down to pure garbage. Right? To be fair You Send We Track variants of emails in general are no longer as popular as they used to be. Maybe, just maybe, people are getting the idea. Popular variants of this are of course the Bill Gates and Microsoft emails, claiming to send you thousands of dollars for every person you send a chain letter to. Also popular was the free laptop from Ericsson version.
6. Worst Virus EVER!!
Type: Fake Virus Hoaxes
The language these types of emails use rarely changes dramatically, making them pretty easy to spot. The majority all claim to be warning about the worst virus ever seen, as confirmed by CNN (or other credible source) – for some inexplicable reason many of these false warnings compare the phantom virus to the real virus Melissa, that broke out a few years back. The emails of course all ask you to send to as many of your email contacts as possible. Many also assert that the email contains an attachment called
"Olympic Torch" that will burn the hard drive. If you are in doubt about any of these warnings, check with your antivirus vendor, or check the page of Sophos of Symantec, but don’t pass them along.
5. Verify Your Bank Details
Type: Bank Detail Scam
These have become so popular they are now considered the quintessential definition of email phishing. The premise is nearly always the same – your bank want you to confirm or verify your details for (ironically) security reasons - so log on using the link in the email provided and enter your details. Only problem is the link on the website takes you to a fake site that just steals your details and sends them to the spammer. Rule of thumb is to just ignore emails from your bank that ask you to enter account information. You can always visit your banks homepage if in any doubt. Other similar variants that just won’t go away are ones that also pose as EBay or PayPal.
4. We Are Overloaded! Forward This Or Face Deletion!
Type: You send We Track
Another popular subject that has spawned many different incarnations is the popular overloaded theme, and it just doesn’t go away. It started to our knowledge with Hotmail some years back now, before they started the .co.uk et al. server expansions. You know the drill we’re sure. The gist of the email is that Hotmail is overloaded with accounts and they need to get rid of the ones not being used – please forward email to prove your account is still active. It’s basically another type of You Send We Track hoax. Of course the same principles apply here, you can’t technically or ethically track forwarded email.
There is that and the fact that Hotmail accounts get deleted anyway when they are idle for so long. From memory, we think they get suspended first, pending you logging in to reactivate it. If you don’t log in still the account is permanently deleted. Either way there is no need for Hotmail to track the email even if they could, for that very reason.
A recent spawn off is Facebook being overloaded, the principle being exactly the same. We’re not sure if Facebook have a similar time restraint on logging in, but they could if they wanted to, so again it would be pointless for them to track emails as well. We’re waiting in devoted anticipation for Twitter to become the next site to be “overloaded” .…
3. A Child is Missing!
Type: Email media hoax
Presumably these are so popular because it doesn’t take a genius to make it, and people assume they are helping this “missing child” by passing it on, unaware its just normally a hoax. We’re not saying there has never been a legitimate chain letter campaign for a real missing child, but the vast majority are fake, and even if it was real, it is a bit of a long shot forwarding mail to help. The missing child genre probably will never stop spawning new variants, but follow our advice and stop forwarding them, and hopefully it will limit the extent to how many inboxes these emails infiltrate.
2. A Child is Dying!
Type: Charity Hoaxes or You Send We Track
These fall into 2 separate categories, both as prolific as the other, and both refusing to expire any time soon. The first is the standard “pray for this child” who is dying on a hospital bed somewhere. The email serves to purpose but to pass the phantom child’s sob story on, but people do it anyway. The other is a little more scheming in that it claims some charity has said it will donate money every time the email is forwarded on, even though you can’t track emails. These really do refuse to just go away, so even if you believe it is genuine, don’t forward it.
1. Earn a Living At Home Taking Surveys
Type: Misc.
There has always been a lot of hype about earning a living working on the Internet, which for the successful ones is completely possible – however one misconception that never seems to die is the fallible survey taking. Now we don’t want to dismiss this entirely – some companies (SOME) do let you take surveys and will actually pay you money to do it – however there is no company to our knowledge that will pay you enough so you can quit your day job. All this garble about getting paid hundreds of dollars a day is pure untruth. You can make nowhere near this amount, or everybody would be doing it! The propaganda has been circulating long enough! The unethical marketing of these lies are often similar to the ones that the scams that claim you can make posting links on Google use (#8) – don’t fall for these.
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