User:Manning Bartlett/Urban Legends and Hoaxes Guide

This is a scratch page - I really haven't figured out how to approach this topic yet. What I want to do is provide a guide article for understanding and coping with hoaxes and legends, providing a thorough set of resources for handling them and developing a method categorising them all. Precisely how I am going to do that has yet to be determined, so I'm nestling it in a personal page for now.

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Urban Legends and hoaxes - categories

• Chain Letters and variations
  • Traditional Chain Letters
  • Sympathy Letters and Requests to Help Someone
  • Threatening chain letters
  • Internet petitions

• The mythical "Email tracker"
  • Free money/gifts from Microsoft/Nokia/etc
  • See a cute video, receive a card

• Genuine, authentic scams
  • Get wealthy in Nigeria
  • AOL's customer survey
  • The mazu.com guide to scams (http://www.mazu.com/scams/index)

• Misinformation
  • Distorted history for political/personal gain
  • Evil corporations doing terrible things
  • Computer virus warnings
  • Truth taken out of context
  • It was true once, but no more

No such technology exists. Examples - Microsoft, Applebee's, Honda, Nokia etc

Reasoning - in a number of cases people are asked to CC a particular address when they forward. It is suspected that this could be a method that spamming organisations use to obtain valid email addresses.