Pet Peeve: Email Hoaxes

Heroin needles and rattlesnakes in restaurant ball pits? Deep coughing to survive a heart-attack? Microsoft will send you money for forwarding this email to everyone in your address book (I know this works because I received a cheque for $X)? Canada/US Post is instituting an 'email tax' because of the declining amount of postal mail? What do these all have in common? They are hoaxes, urban legends, and for some reason otherwise reasonably intelligent people feel compelled to forward them to everyone they've ever met since they were in preschool as if they were on commission.

Why do people feel their lives will not be complete without pressing the Forward button? What goes through their heads as they pass on to their friends and family that using an optical mouse will give you cancer, or that some friend of a friend ate a hamburger that had cockroach/ spider eggs in it at _____ (insert restaurant name here), and soon had cockroaches/ spiders hatching from inside his mouth? What makes us so prone to believe something just because it shows up in our inbox?

Seriously, if some child had been injured by a hidden hypodermic needle while playing in a ballpit at a restaurant, do you really think you'd hear about it through an email before the media grabbed it? A couple of months ago, a fast food restaurant in New York was closed by the health department because of rats and it was all over the news, even all the way up in Calgary. I don't know which would have smaller odds, getting a rattlesnake into the ballpit unnoticed and having it survive long enough to bite someone, or that it didn't get any media coverage and you're only hearing about it through a series of email forwards.

Are you a bad parent for not thoroughly inspecting every restaurant play area for venomous reptiles and discarded needles? While you're in there, why not check for broken beer bottles or alien tracking devices? If someone read you the same story word-for-word over the phone or in person, you would most likely laugh at them or at least find a few points in the story which make you question the account's credibility. Is it the string of '>>'s from being forwarded from 37 other people that makes it sound convincing? Or the fact that you have to scroll down for 18 pages of email headers (To: everyone I know, From: ________) that makes us think at one point this story could have been plausible (two more peeves, but that'll wait for another time)?

I have yet to find one of these email hoaxes that has taken me longer than 1 minute to debunk. What's my secret? I use an obscure website called Google, type in a summary of the hoax (usually the subject line from the email), and hit 'Search'. I then am given a number of websites that address the hoax, some of them even tell me how long the hoax has been in circulation as well as different variations on the same theme (one of my favorite sites is Hoax-Slayer ).

As you may have guessed from my rambling, this is a touchy topic for me. Fortunately, if you reply back to the sender(s) with the debunk information, sooner or later they stop sending these emails to you. They don't stop their forwarding compulsion, they just take you off their distribution list.

So here's your homework, the next time you receive an email saying that your friend's coworker's roommate's uncle once saw Bigfoot, before you even think of hitting the "Forward" button you:

1. Stop. Ask yourself just how realistic the message is.
2. Look it up. Use Google, Hoax-Slayer, or any number of myth-busting websites out there heroically trying to curb the spread of these virulent messages
3. Once you have found it to be a hoax, why not hit "Reply All" and send the debunk out to everyone and hope they'll forward the truth as quickly as they forwarded the junk.