I've just had an e-mail forwarded to me by a person who (IMHO) is pretty intelligent and well-meaning. It purported to alert people to an alleged scam involving unscrupulous cashiers adding unauthorised cash-back requests to card sales and pocketing the cash from customers who hadn't checked their receipts. The style of the message made me suspicious, so I spent a minute (literally a minute) googling it before discovering that the "warning" was a hoax.
These sort of hoax chain messages have a generic, easily-recognisable style - THE USE OF CAPITALS (generally in the message and the subject line), multiple exclamation marks and an urgent plea to 'pass this on to your friends / family / loved ones'. It always surprises me that even quite bright people do forward them - I'm guessing that the appeal to the welfare of your loved ones, combined with a lack of time for fact checking is what triggers otherwise rational people to hit the "send" button and propagate the hoax.
I know nothing about the sort of people who start these rumours and don't know whether there's any motivation beyond the rather odd satisfaction of having created an inaccurate meme and watching it replicate. But I'd like to make a small plea to anybody reading this who receives a warning e-mail with lots of caps and exclamation marks, warning about some scam or danger to which you can alert your friends and family by forwarding the warning to everyone in your address book. If it looks like a hoax, it probably is, so please don't spread it. If you still think it might conceivably be true, it's probably serious enough to be worth a couple of minutes of your own time, spent either googling, or going straight to a site like Hoax-Slayer, before clogging up the in-boxes of your friends, family and colleagues.
Together, one e-mail at a time, we could create a world with a just little more head space for thinking about what's real and important, rather than fretting about unreal threats, or cursing the rising tide of disinformation.
Thursday, 9 December 2010
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1 comments:
There's a very easy way to tell if these e-mails are a hoax or not: if it comes in an e-mail with a circulation of more than three people then it's not true. Actually I'm tempted to say: if it comes as an e-mail rather than a memo then it's not true. Then I remembered that before t'web these things circulated as memos instead. As to your point about forwarding them, I remember the Home Office Security people sending one "Security Warning" around that was a well-known urban myth (the missing UPS uniforms one). It's net-savvy that mattered, not training or intelligence.
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