Dawn received an email today asking for help in locating a missing child by the name of Ashley Flores. The email says she has been missing for 2 weeks from Philedalphia, PA and is feared she may be in South America, Canada, or even overseas and asks that the email be forwarded to everyone in your address book. "If it was your child, you would want all the help you could get."
Who could say no to a heart-wrenching plea like that?
I, for one.
A lengthy and exhaustive search on Google returns about 17,600 pages on this hoax. Try it for yourself, go to http://www.google.com/, enter "Ashley Flores" (with the quotes), hit enter, and voila! After 0.23 seconds of processing time, your top results are:
www.snopes.com
urbanlegends.about.com
www.hoax-slayer.com
www.breakthechain.org
There are now variations that say Ashley (same photo) is missing from Mandurah in Australia. The original version was first reported in May 2006 and is almost word-for-word identical to the Penny Brown hoax that has been in circulation since 2001. Other variations based on the same "template" include searches for children named Michael Hunt and Evan Trembley.
While there is an Ashley Flores, she is not missing. Her friend(s) thought it would be funny to put her name and picture into the Penny Brown email. We're all laughing buddy...
The problem with hoaxes like this is that when a legitimate email comes along (like for Matthew Leveson), we dismiss it as a hoax. My world would be a much happier place if people would learn to take a few seconds to research before forwarding on the email.
Internet pranksters learned long ago that hoax emails are often more effective than viruses at filling up inboxes and being annoying. I'm often reminded of the "Amish Virus" when I see these emails that ask you to pass it on to everyone you know:
"As we haveth no technology nor programming experience, this virus worketh on the honour system. Please delete all the files from thy hard drive and manually forward this virus to all on thy mailing list.
"We thank thee for thy cooperation,
"— The Amish Computer Engineering Dept"
