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Our Top Ten Internet and Email HoaxesIt’s a sad and frustrating fact that so many hoaxes and scams are getting so much global attention. Whether it be emails being passed to and from millions of inboxes the world over, scamming thousands of pounds from naïve recipients, or even fooling major media outlets, these hoaxes are only becoming more and more popular, and it seems the learning curve needed to spot the fakes is not growing fast enough to deal with the increasing level of believability these swindles often possess. However, there is always that odd creative, convincing and apparently credible con every so often that just fools almost everybody. Here we list our carefully compiled list of our favourite top ten Internet and Email hoaxes of all time! In no particular order -10. The Bill Gates Scam (a.k.a. Bill Gates is Sharing his Fortune!)A.k.a. a lot of other thing as well. It’s true that there have been so many variants and incarnations of this particular hoax, and that’s hardly surprising since its one of the most successful hoax emails of all time. We would imagine that almost everybody has seen this in some variation, whether it included Intel, Internet Explorer, AOL, Microsoft, or even Walt Disney Jr. it’s all one big sham. The premise of this email is that it claims to track forwarded email through a new email tracking program. For more information on this type of hoax, click here.Once you have forwarded the email, Bill Gates will pay you money. Other variants go on to say that every other person you send it to, then sends it on again, will lead to you getting even more money! Well to begin with, if you have read our guide to the basics, you will know that tracking forwarded email is technically impossible as you cannot embed any dynamic programming code into an email and then let it execute without the user realising (which is what you would need to happen so you know where the email is) as this would be an easy security hole for people looking to damage computers to exploit. Also tracking forwarded email is ethically dubious even if it was possible. Civil liberty groups would claim it was a gross invasion of privacy. Who you send an email to is your business. In addition to this Bill Gates is not going to give people money for merely clicking on the Forward button on an email message. As much as we would like to let people give us money for doing effectively nothing, life never works this way. If you want to earn easy money for doing nothing, then play the Lottery. You’ll have a better chance of getting paid. One of the many, many examples of the email can be seen below. Subject: FW: Microsoft and AOL merger I'm forwarding a forwarded message...read on, it it works you may get $$ from Microsoft. Certainly Bill has enough to share-maybe today we'll be blessed financially! I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $5.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $3.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $1.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my e-mail and within days, I received a check for $800.00. 9. Dihydrogen Monoxide PetitionIt’s not really a hoax, more of a very clever joke, but that’s alright because we believe this yarn definitely deserves a place in the list. You see it masquerades as a petition against a dangerous chemical called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Never heard of it? That’s okay, you’re learning now. You see it can be a dangerous chemical, that’s in acid rain. It makes metal rust quicker. It can be found in cancerous cells, is a key ingredient in some bombs and if we breath in enough of it we would die. Yet traces are found in almost every drink and most foods. It’s that kind of information that the petition banning the chemical uses to get people to sign it. Where’s the petition, I want to sign now! I hear you cry. Well hold your horses. Dihydrogen Monoxide is better known by its less technical name. Water. That’s right, plain old H2O. Still want to sign the petition? We think not as it would mean the destruction of the human race.The fact that it is just water is conveniently left out by the creators of the hoax, which meant millions of people worldwide unwittingly signed a petition banning water and sent it to their friends. The email is clearly an example of how ignorant we can be, especially when confronted with facts in a scientific structure, and to its credit it does raise some good points. Penn and Teller did a face to face version of the hoax, getting an interviewer to get people to sign her clipboard petition, which as expected nearly almost everybody signed with limited questions. At the same time it does highlight how petitions really aren’t that efficient, with people signing things without really knowing what they’re doing. Either way it’s a clever joke, but to avoid embarrassment, we’d suggest not passing it on if you do happen to receive it. 8. Mid Plane Collision PhotosThese photos (below) have appeared in various email stories now, about real life plane crashes, most recently in the tragic Air France Flight. The hoax claims the pictures are genuine photos taken by a passenger as the explosion/collision (depending what variant you read) occurred.  What makes this hoax outrageous is where the photos actually did derive from. They were snapshots from the first season of popular TV series ‘Lost’. One of the main characters played by Evangeline Lily is seen on the left clearly wearing handcuffs, which was part of the programmes plot. (One similar variant showed a clip from Armageddon, masquerading as the space shuttle Columbus blowing up.) Well this particular hoax was launched by Mr. Carlos Cardoso, a Brazilian Blogger who started it to show how easy it was sell implausible stories to a gullible audience. It worked a treat and escaped into millions of inboxes worldwide, and was given new life after the A330 Air France flight crash spawned a new variant. 7. Hotmail and/or Facebook is Overloaded!!Another popular subject that has spawned many different incarnations is the popular Overloaded theme. 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. There is an example below, but 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 like the Bill Gates scam above. 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 the could if they wanted to, so again it would be pointless for them to track emails as well. We’re waiting in avid anticipation for Twitter to become the next site to be “overloaded” .… An example message - Subject: Fwd: Warning - Hotmail users WARNING WARNING Hotmail is overloading and we need to get rid of some people and we want to find out which users are actually using their Hotmail accounts. So if you are using your account, please pass thise-mail to every Hotmail user that you can and if you do not pass this letter to anyone we will delete your account. From Mr. Jon Henerd Hotmail Admin. Dept. 6. Good Times Virus HoaxNo list of popular hoaxes could be complete with one of the first successful virus hoax campaigns that came in the form of the mythical Good Times virus, dating back to 1994. The original was a very simple 5 line or so warning about a virus called Good Times which would ‘harm’ your computer files. And that’s about it. The actual amount of people who received the email is probably a lot smaller that the amount reached today by current popular hoaxes, but that would be down to the simple fact that much, much fewer people used the Internet back in 1994, but if we were to talk about percentage of Internet users reached, then the results would surely be magnificent.As Good Times was a major contributor to the evolution of fake virus hoaxes, it could be argued that nearly all fake virus hoaxes are incarnations of Good Times as the underlying principle is the same – promote a fake virus in order to spread to as many people as possible. Good Times has even spawned its own humorous parody in appropriately named Bad Times, which claims implausible things will occur if you download this ‘virus’ – such as it would “seduce your grandmother” and “give you Dutch Elm Disease” – definitely one to stay away from! 5. LonelyGirl15Lonelygirl15 is a YouTube hoax and we feel deserves its place here for the ingenuity of the unique premise. It started innocently enough with a YouTube blogger posting video blogs, the new craze of people talking into their web cam, also known as vlogs.The video blogger was called Bree, a 16 year old girl with the YouTube username lonelygirl15. She’d post a new vlog every so often, talking about normal subjects for a girl her age. The authenticity of her character was increased as she would post replies to other videos on YouTube, drop names of other famous ‘YouTubers’ and had her own MySpace page. However as time went on the blogs took a more sinister turn as Bree would begin to talk about a cult her parents were involved with. Some fans became worried for the young blogger, and others became suspicious. It was mid 2006 when the hoax became public, and Bree turned out to be American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose, and the blogs were well scripted “episodes” . It carried on for a while after it was revealed as fictitious and spawned some spin offs, one set in London, UK. 4. Christopher Walken for President?This hoax truly went worldwide. Millions of people forwarded news that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Christopher Walken was running for the ultimate title, President of the United States. News appeared on thousands of blog sites, and many people fell for the hoax. It even has its own website here. It wasn’t until his publicist officially denied the rumours that the gossip died down, but still to this day spam email continues to spread about it. It was ultimately a very successful hoax so I guess we’ll have to wait for 2012 until we know the identity of the next celeb “running for President”.3. The $250 Cookie RecipeThis particular hoax dates back to at least the 1940s people say, and is a story of revenge against the larger bitter money stealing corporations, which we assume serves as motivation for people to spread the story, which explains why these various incarnations of this fabrication keep relentlessly circulating around the globe. The outline of the story is this – woman is overcharged for the recipe of a cookie, she wants her money back and the cookie company say…well…no. Woman then says she’ll send the recipe to everyone via email! The newer versions say the cookie recipe belonged to Neiman Marcus, a.k.a. Mrs Fields, and that the recipe was sold for $250, not $2.50 which the waitress implied. We can’t really guarantee that the original story was wholly based on fantasy, but we’re sure these newer variants are completely false.The newer variants of the email go on to say “this isn’t some stupid chain letter” – well, actually, that’s exactly what it is, but a hugely popular one at that. 2. Federal Bill 602P HoaxIt was, up until the year 2000, an average run-of-the-mill email chain hoax floating from inbox to inbox of naïve Internet users. It was about Federal Bill 602P which was a bill claiming to commence a 5 cent fee for people sending emails - we'd condsider it a relatively easy hoax to spot. That was until it fell into the hands of Marcia Kramer, who just happened to be sponsoring a debate between Hilary Clinton and Rick Lazio who were in the midst of the year 2000 New York senator race.Now we shy away from hoaxes that make politicians look silly so… okay that’s actually a lie - so here is what happened – Marcia Kramer, during the 2nd debate between the 2 two politicians actually asked both what they though about the phantom bill, completley unaware that no such bill existed, a mere creation of hoaxers. Clinton, honestly answered she had never heard of the phantom bill, but after a description, she said she would be against it. Rick Lazio launched into a tyrade – “This is an example of the government's greedy hand in trying to take money from taxpayers that it has no right to." No one realised they had unwittingly discussed a chain email hoax until way after the debate had ended. And that is why its on our top ten. 1. Masal Bugduv HoaxOne of our favorite hoaxes really did highlight the shockingly disturbing reality of how far a simple scam can progress. AP entries were made about a Moldovian football prodigy (that’s English football by the way, the thing Americans call soccer) called Masal Bugduv. He’s the next Zidane they say. Bloggers started to write about him and he ended up on the Times list of promising footballers.One problem though, Masal Bugduv is not a real person. The AP entries were faked, and the information just got passed up the line until he was on a rather prestigous list of footballing greats. Other than the Times who must have been pretty desparate for players, the other worrying thing is just how far can a hoax go if you can create fake people? Well the hoax is well documented now. At the time of writing, if you google Masal Bugduv in quotation marks, you get 2,710 results, ALL about the fake player. Though I think we can assume now that all the sites are talking about the hoax, unless someone is planning on giving ‘the player that never was’ some sort of other award, like a medal? If you would like to comment on this article, please feel free to contact us. By Craig, ThatsNonsense.com - 02/08/2009 Back to the top
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