If you’ve got an email address, chances are you’ve received at least one kind of email hoax in your inbox.
Chances are you know one when you see one.
There are the scams, of course. A subject line that reads “request for urgent business relationship” should be an automatic red flag.
Somewhere, someone has an eye on your bank account.
But there’s a variety of hoaxes floating around out there.
Take this one, which was forwarded to me the other day by a reader. The email claimed that some Marines in Iraq had written to Starbucks to say how much they enjoyed Starbucks coft ee and to ask whether the company could send some beans to troops there. According to this email, Starbucks responded by saying: Thanks for your inquiry, but we don’t support the war or anyone in it, so no coffee for you.
The author of the email goes on to urge readers to boycott Starbucks for this very reason.
The writer’s story is quite sensational, but of course it’s bogus. Apply just a bit of skepticism and you’ll see why. No company, especially one that relies upon its image as much as Starbucks, is going to snub U.S. soldiers fighting overseas - at leastnot as flagrantly as this email suggested. That would be like driving your company’s bus oft a public-relations clift .
The website hoax-slayer.com explains the origin of this email in great detail. It is based on a message written and distributed in 2004 by a soldier who had been misled by an assortment of rumors, leading him to believe that Starbucks did not support the war in Iraq. Starbucks eventually contacted him directly to clarify that what he had heard was false, and that Starbucks in fact very much supports our men and women in uniform. The soldier sent a follow-up email to his friends to explain that he hadn’t done any actual research like he should have.
But of course, the damage already had been done. The soldier’s original message made the rounds and, as Ican attest, is still making the rounds - seven years later.
As the old saying goes, a rumor gets halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
Often these hoax emails are laughable.
About a month ago, I received the one about how Bill Gates wants to share his wealth with me. All I had to do was forward the email.
Microsoft would track it and pay me hundreds of dollars for each time I forwarded it, based on the premise that Microsoft was conducting some kind of “beta test.”
According to hoax-slayer.com, the claim is “totally absurd,” in case you had any doubt.
By the way, hoax-slayer.com is quite interesting. It provides the truth about dozens of hoaxes that have circulated in recent years.
I try to imagine how these hoaxes get started. Are they born from sheer malice?
Boredom? Perhaps it’s some guy sitting in his parents’ basement, unemployed and tired of his video games, who decides to get on his computer and concoct a massive practical joke.
Unfortunately, I’ve not only been the recipient of emailed hoaxes; I’ve also been part of one.
I was a reporter in Ohio at the time. Someone - to this day, I have no idea who - wrote a fake news article claiming that a specific Chinese restaurant in the area had been caught serving dog meat to its customers. This “article” came with my name and my newspaper’s name attached to it.
It’s impossible to say how many people received that email, but our newspaper received at least a couple of calls about it. I still wonder whether the author wrote the article as an attack on the restaurant, on me, or on both of us.
There have been a number of job-related things that have gotten on my nerves throughout my career, but few things have ticked me oft more than the Chinese restaurant email.
My advice is to be wary of any unsolicited email from people you don’t know (and even people you do know). And if you do open it, don’t believe everything you read.
And please, don’t forward it to me.
DAVE PEROZEK IS AN EDITORIAL WRITER FOR NORTHWEST ARKANSAS NEWSPAPERS.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 01/08/2012