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:

1. Any email that requests that you forward it to your friends is almost always a hoax of some kind.
2. 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.

Labels: web

posted by Lura on Thursday, March 20, 2008