Catching lies
The Internet fosters the spread of hoaxes at lightning speed. But it also makes it possible to debunk them just as quickly.
Unfortunately, not everyone is adept at debunking, with unfortunate consequences. People fall for online hoaxes every day – sometimes just believing a rumor or urban myth, other times losing real money.
You can guard against this. A combination of suspicion and common sense is your best defense.
If an e-mail arrives with the subject line “PLEASE VERY URGENT,” you can almost certainly delete it without reading what it says. If, for whatever reason, you choose to read it, be suspicious.
Would a “bill and exchange manager” from the “Bank of Africa” – who, inevitably, has a poor grasp of grammar and spelling – really write to you about “an account that belongs to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family on 25TH JULY, 2000 CONCORDE PLANE CRASH Flight AF4590 with the whole passenger’s aboard”? (I am quoting from an e-mail I recently received.)
Certainly, most people know to hit delete when they see that one or one like it.
But in the age of e-mail, hoaxsters can easily craft pranks with the whiff of reality. One persistent urban legend has Neiman Marcus charging $250 for a chocolate chip cookie recipe. The legend was spread in an e-mail, purportedly created as revenge by a customer who thought she was paying $2.50 for the recipe.
The story is entirely false, yet it has enough staying power for Neiman Marcus, as a way to debunk the myth, to offer a cookie recipe online with a reference to the prank. Just Google “Neiman Marcus cookie,” and you will find it.
Unfortunately, techno-savvy pranksters have upped the ante in recent years, veering from cruel or silly pranks into identity theft.
One type of hoax, known as phishing, aims to con you into giving up personal information, such as credit card numbers, user names and passwords. An e-mail arrives appearing to be from a reputable company, such as a well-known online store or bank.
The e-mail directs you to a bogus – though very real-looking – Web site, then asks you to update your personal account information, perhaps for security purposes. In fact, the site is a trap, intended only to capture your info.
The latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer include tools to warn you of phishing sites. These tools aren’t foolproof.
Again, common sense and suspicion are always warranted.
That often means you need to do your own research into hoaxes. Your research need not be time-consuming.
If you suspect something is amiss in an e-mail or Web site, type the site’s name or the e-mail’s subject line into a search engine such as Google or the news site digg.com, along with the word hoax or scam. You may well turn up the details of the hoax, or perhaps even a debate about whether it’s a hoax or not.
Also be sure to visit Snopes.com, a site tracking urban legends and hoaxes. The site includes a page with the “25 urban legends currently circulating most widely.”
Other sites specializing in hoaxes (and their debunking) are worth a look, too. These include Vmyths ( www.vmyths.com), Sophos ( www.sophos.com/ security/hoaxes/) and Hoaxbusters (hoaxbusters.ciac.org).