Hoax and untrue forwarded emails

Some of my friends like to forward emails they received and found interesting or alarming or attractive or fun, etc. to me, like many of you who has an email address and some friends. :P

Some of those emails are alarming health advices like "you eat prawn and vitamin C together, YOU DIE!";
some really touches me to help like "For each email forwarded, some companies or foundation will donate 2cents to this very cute and nice but badly ill kid";
or very attractive one which I'd want to get like "Send this email out to this email address and 20 people to receive a free PSP!!";
some require immediate action to avoid disastrous consequences like
"Yahoo will close your account if you don't send this to 20 people to let them know you're an active user.".

There are many other variations. I used to struggle to whether believe it, believe my friend on it to avoid missing out or being a cold hearted deadwood. But thanks to the search engine, and Google is my friend on this. Recently I'd just copy a big chunk of the text in the email and search it on google, when I verified that it's not true in less than 5 minutes, I'd email back the person who forwarded that to me and let him/her know about it as well.

The followings are what I wrote on several different cases. I just copy and paste them here. Save me typing them and paraphrasing them again. Reading back these email I sent out, I think I was rather frustrated at times and was not very courteous on my words. Hope it doesn't offend you. :P

Hi there,
Good to hear from you. And I enjoy some good email attachments from time to time. However, I shall let you know that a lot of the email floating around internet are purely rubbish created by jokers, like this one unfortunately. So I copy a paragraph from a page I get after google about some text from this email:

source:
http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-make-a-wish.htm

Whenever you receive an email that urges you to immediately forward that mail to everyone you know, there is a very good chance the email is a hoax. Please take the time to verify the message by doing a Google search before you send it on to anyone else. In most cases when you take an arbitrary sentence from the message and google for it you'll end up with many hoax warning pages as the result.

The following email is one such hoax. It says the Make A Wish Foundation will donate seven cents toward the medical bills of a child dying from cancer for every address you forward this email to. This is completely fake. Amy Bruce does not exist. Please forward the URL of this page to teh person who sent you this email.

The Foundation has made no promise of donating money for forwarded emails because it has no way of knowing if or how many times anyone forwards any email. Whoever came up with this sick joke is taking advantage of the good will of helpful people. The story pushes all the right buttons: A sick, innocent child, the double victim of abuse and cancer. Yet it's all a lie. This hoax has been around since 1999 and is documented as a hoax on several websites.

More details on:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/cancer.asp

Make a wish foundation denying that they had anything to do with this e-mail:
http://www.wish.org/home/chainletters.htm


Please send this to the people you send this email to, and get this email from. Let's stop rubbish on internet/email and keep the good ones alive.

Take care.

Hi, K,

Google and snopes.com is your friend for this one.

Just copy a big chunk of the original text into google and search for it. And chances are you'll get something in snopes.com telling you whether it's true or false with sensible reasonings.

This is what I did, I copy this whole chunk of text
"Dear YAHOO User, Because of the sudden rush of people signing up to YAHOO, it has come to our attention that we are vastly running out of resources. So, within a month's time,anyone" and put it into google.

Google link

Then the first one come out to be from snopes.com :
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/overload.asp

Read it and be happy for becoming wiser over internet hoaxes. :)

Thanks for sharing the alert, I did a search in Google for "prawn" and "Vitamin C", and these are the top hits:

http://www.snopes.com/toxins/shrimp.htm
http://breakthechain.org/exclusives/prawns.html
http://www.bighoaxes.com/hoaxe_6_380.html
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/v/vitaminshrimp.htm


Who do I trust? To eat or not to eat?
A responsible 'broadcaster' of important information should really includes his/her contact for careful/skeptical readers to verify the source.

Hi guys,

I personally think Sony will not do such unbounded giveaways. But I still wish it to be true, so I did a search on google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sonyworld+free+psp

And unfortunately, my guess was right. See the links:
http://www.playstation.com.au/news/pspemailhoax.jhtml
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/sonypsp.asp

I guess the dangerous part of this kind of emails is that the pspgiveaway@sonyworld.com email address you have to send to to get the goodies might be a spammer's fishing net. So when people forward to their friends hoping to get the goodies and hoping their friends can get the goodies too, the real "goodies" can turn out to be more spams, as the spammers now have your email address!!

Anyway, keep the email flowings. At least this hoax keeps us in touch. Haha! Have a wonderful day!

I'm not a KFC supporter. And they could be using Genetically
Engineered sources as their supply, (think about it, chicken used to
take 9 months to mature, now only 21 days?!! How on earth could that
be natural!!) but I would still want people to know that this article
is another internet Hoax!

do a search on google with the words University+of+New+Hampshire+kfc
Google link

Or go straight here to Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.asp

Here's a short extract from the site:

# Links on KFC's web site (such as the About KFC page clearly
describe its product as "chicken" numerous times, something it could
hardly get away with if the government were prohibiting the company
from using that word. And the KFC web site can also be reached through
the domain name kentuckyfriedchicken.com.
.........

Send this back to those who sent to you lah. Stop all these crap, this
is not the right way to bring down KFC.