Now that my teenaged daughter is an active emailer, she's joined what has to be the second generation of email hoax and chain letter participants. This week she forwarded her whole family an email hoax about a supposedly missing teenager. She did this, thinking her involvement was the "right thing to do." After all, the way the email was written, it was her civic and moral duty to help the grieving family find their boy. And she has such a big heart she was really happy to find a simple way to help.
That was when I had to introduce her to the "wonderful" world of online hoaxes and scams. Slightly different from viruses and phishing spam, these missives spread fear or encourage fake charitable efforts for realistic sounding issues or problems. For example: boycotts of companies who are mistreating the soldiers in Iraq; dangerous consumer products that are known to injure children; new computer viruses for which there is no cure; women being attacked at gas stations; the list goes on and on. You can imagine how dissapointed my daughter was that her good intentions had been abused by her lack of sophistication.
When you receive one of these in your email box, take a moment to question it. Why would the only way you'd hear about something this urgent be in an email from a friend? Wouldn't the story have made the major press organizations? Perhaps. You don't have to stop trusting your friends as a source of news and information. But there is a very easy and free way to check out these emails before you hit "Forward" or "Send". Check it out first on a neutral site like Symantec's Security Response or at a specialty site such as snopes.com.
And then take all that great charitable and do-gooder energy and donate money or time to a real charity like the American Red Cross!