About Hoax Emails
A friend of mine forwarded an email to me asking me to review it & help them discern whether or not it was an email hoax. It was. Specifically, it was a hoax about a virus… but it could have been about anything scary. Last week I received the email hoax about carjacking from someone else. Anyway, below, you’ll find a snippet of my response to this type of email. Typically, I included a link to snopes.com in an effort to educate the rube.
Here’s 2 hints for detecting hoax emails:
- Any email that requests that you forward it to your friends is
almost always a hoax of some kind. - If the email is written in a colored, big font, with lots of exclamation points, it is almost guaranteed to be a hoax. Serious people who
write about really important or really scary stuff usually do it in a small black font… no extra emphasis, no exclamation points, and with little or no emotion. On the other hand, if it sounds like it was written by a Vulcan lawyer, maybe it is real.
I can’t save the world, but I try.
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