“Craig Shergold is a 7 year old boy living in England who has terminal brain cancer and is expected to live for just a few more months. His dying wish is to be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the recipient of the most business cards. To make his last with come true, please send him a card.”
Did you receive this mail? What would you do? You might stop and have pity on the poor boy and drop your business card to the address. Or you might pass it on or simply ignore.
If not exactly this one, at least a number of smart variants of this kind of mail with different stories come in your mailbox in every now and then and ask your attention. Are these stories true?
The above story is true. Well, almost true. It happened in 1987. Craig’s wish was reported in a newspaper, and he received several million cards and made it to the record book. Since then Guinness Book has discontinued that category. An American Philanthropist donated a lot of money and Craig had advanced brain surgery and he is alive and well today. Neither Craig, nor the story died, the story kept being revived year after year, and the cards kept coming and coming—estimated at about 250,000,000 by today. Please do not send cards, this is now a hoax. Actually, this is how an Urban Legend was born.
Hoax! Urban Legends! What are they? Just rumors or something more than that?
There are lots of stories that people love to believe. Most people have heard the story, usually really happened to a ‘friend of a friend’. Those stories were known to lot of people over ages and over locations and happened to almost everyone’s acquaintances. They are urban legends. Craig’s story is one of thousands of urban legends in circulation and probably one the very few hoaxes reported that are resembled with a real incidence.
This is October 2010. Few days back I got a forwarded SMS. Message claims that October 2010 has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays and that this combination of days only occurs once in 823 years. So I should make a wish in this month that surely will come true!!!! As if the extra weekend is the What-do-you-want kind of gene. However any 31-days month starting with a Friday will have the 5 weekends. It happened in October, 2004 and will happen again in October, 2021. But believe it or not, still I am getting the same SMS from lot of my friends. Probably lot of wishes made in this October will lead to traffic congestion in the heaven.
Email, SMS, letters etc. are the best media to propagate the lie. Urban legends peep in almost every single gossip with couple of friends. With chain mails, now they are spread faster and wider and believed better than ever before. No longer does the spreading of these lies have to depend on whispers from human to human; the spreading happens at the speed of digital bits over wires.
Urban legends are everywhere. As examples,
There is the well-worn story about the guy who went to the hospital for a minor operation and then found his kidneys had been removed (and sold).
A woman who died a horrific death after drinking a Coca Cola. The death was caused by dried rat urine on the rim of the can.
A secret alert can be sent to police by entering your PIN in reverse in ATMs. (Do you have a palindromic PIN?)
The employee in a big garment shop fits a CC camera in the trial room of and sells the movies of changing cloths of beautiful girls.
A man got a phone call on his cell phone while he was at the petrol pump. When he answered the call, the pump exploded.
All of the above are false. There are more—smoking menthol cigarettes leads to impotency, people only use 10% of their brain (the rest of it, is for future growth), toilets swirl the wrong way in the Southern Hemisphere, hair grows thicker if shaved, cannibalism was common in the past, low temperatures causes sniffles, reading in dim light causes shortsightedness, and so on. There are millions such “facts” that are plain false.
The stories and so-called facts are very presented very convincing, but they are simply not true. A compendium of recent urban legends is maintained at www.urbanlegends.com and http://www.hoax-slayer.com (this site has thousands of such stories).
In the past decade, US researcher Jan Harold Brunvand studied different urban legends and hoaxes. According to him a typical urban legend will exhibit most or all of the following characteristics:
- It's a narrative (a story).
- It's alleged to be true.
- It's just plausible (sometimes just barely plausible) enough to be believed.
- Its veracity is unproven.
- It's of spontaneous (or indeterminate) origin.
- It's likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.
- It varies in the telling.
- It circulates by being passed from individual to individual, either orally or in written form (e.g., via fax, photocopy or email).
- It's attributed to putatively trustworthy secondhand sources (e.g., "a friend of a friend," "my sister's accountant," etc.).
Hoaxes are not urban legends. Though in general, both terms are used interchangeably. A hoax is an act, document or artifact intended to deceive or defraud the public. Examples range from relatively benign instances of trickery, such as April Fools pranks, to scientific fraud on a grand scale, such as the Piltdown man hoax of the early 20th century.
I cannot resist saying about origin of the English word ‘Hoax’. It came from the term ‘Hocus’ of the every magician’s secret phrase “Hocus Pocus Gili Gili Gili’. One great magician said “this phrase means nothing and everything. It means man loves to be tricked”. What a satire!
In 1912, Charles Dawson collected fragments of a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village in East Sussex, UK. He claimed them as fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human. The experts of the time examined the specimen and agreed him. This specimen was believed to be the body part of a missing-link named "Piltdown Man". Anthropological history was rewritten according to the specimen. But everything became a subject of controversy as well. After 40 years, the scientists exposed this as a forgery! The specimen was consisting of lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human. Charles Dawson became a villain from one of the greatest discoverers of the century. This is “Piltdown hoax” and is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever.
In this regard, I wish to share a well known debate about the landing of Appllo11 on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin in 1969. The whole world witnessed the video from the moon and clapped in the “giant leap for the mankind”. But debate started right in 1970. The flag in the video footage was waving. How is it possible without air on the lunar surface? There are several questions raised till 2004 that NASA failed to explain. The inconsistency in the angle of shadow, the existence of stars, sand-like lunar dust etc drew the attention of the critics. Though this is not yet declared as a hoax as everybody is waiting for NASA’s response.
Shaking the world of wisdom is not a hoax can do only. Read the following email.
Dear Citibank Member,
This email was sent by the Citibank server to verify your e-mail address. You must complete this process by clicking on the link below and entering in the small window your Citibank ATM/Debit Card number and PIN that you use on ATM. This is done for your protection - because some of our members no longer have access to their email addresses and we must verify it.
To verify your e-mail address and access your bank account, click on the link below. If nothing happens when you click on the link (or if you use AOL), copy and paste the link into the address bar of your web browser.
[LINK REMOVED]
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Thank you for using Citibank!
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If you get any such mail, would you click and provide the information? Stop! Do not provide any such information regarding PIN, Password etc in anywhere. Nobody, not even the manager of the bank is entitled to ask this information. PIN, Password etc are automatically generated by machines and kept secret even to the bank employees.
In 2006, lot of Citibank customer got this mail. It was reported as a scam.
Another mail containing a link claims to come from Income Tax Department and congratulates you for winning a tax refund of a good amount. They also ask the bank account details to initiate the tax refund process.
This kind of scams, that tricks to get your personal information are called phishing. There is a international forum to report against internet fraud and phishing. It is called Anti-Phishing Working Group (http://www.antiphishing.org).
In this context I should say something on certifying authorities. Probably you have seen this word “VeriSign Certified” in lot of places in Internet. But what does that mean? VeriSign is a certifying authority i.e. a trusted third party that certifies the genuineness of a website. The websites that involves monitory transaction must contain ‘https://’ in the address instead of ‘http://’. https means the website is certified by any certifying authority and the data sent is secured and only the receiving organization is getting the information. As a research scholar in the area of network security, I beg to share my suggestions to avoid becoming a victim of phishing fraud.
ï If you receive any unsolicited email from a bank or other institution that asks you to click an included hyperlink and provide sensitive personal information, then you should view the message with the utmost suspicion. If you have any doubts at all about the veracity of the email, contact the institution directly to check.
ï Never click on a link in an email in order to access the website of a bank or other institutions that may be the target of scammers. The safest method is to manually enter the URL of the institution's website into your browser's address bar.
ï If you supply sensitive information on a website, always ensure that the site is secure. The address of the page should start with "https://" not just "http://" and the Lock icon should be displayed in the browser's status bar. If these indicators are not present, it means that the site is not secure and information you enter on the site is not protected. Fraudulent web forms related to phishing scams are often non-secure sites. Please note, however, that even an apparently secure site may be fraudulent. The fact that a site appears to be secure is not by itself a guarantee that the site is legitimate. However, legitimate sites that require users to supply personal information will always be secure.
ï Use firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware software to protect your computer system. Some phishing scam emails may carry trojans or other malware that may compromise your system.
ï Ensure that your browser, system software and other applications have the latest security updates available. This will reduce the risk of scammers accessing your system via unpatched software vulnerabilities.
Every single month, I win thousands of pounds from different lottery agencies that never exist. These spam mails claims a nominal fees of some hundred pounds as processing fees.
Many of the mails ask money as donation for treatment of some child or poor man. Many kind hearted people actually send the money. But most of the cases the story is not true. So before being the savior, please verify the story. At least I find no point of giving money to the cheaters. Rather as the reward of being honest, you can send the money to this poor author.
Chain mails that solicit money are against the law in the United States and many other countries. Unfortunately, in India just sending such mail is not a punishable crime unless it actually cheats money from the account.
“IIT Bombay student Anupam Biswas 5th sem. Mechanical Engg is suffering from Colukabki (caused due to excessive nabad and depression) a disease very rarely found (3 in a billion). His condition is very pathetic and the treatment is very expensive, obviously his parents are not able to afford his treatment. Orkut has agreed to pay 1 paisa after each time this message is forward. So please pass to all ur friends. please i request you to pass it to as many people as u can and lets try to save someone's life.”
I got this mail at least for 7 times this year. Firstly, there is no disease called Colukabki. Secondly, there is no Anupam Biswas in IIT Bombay. Thirdly, nobody gives money to anybody for forwarding mails.
Chain Mails keep on coming to crowd your mailbox. They come from known people, so cannot be spammed. Obviously the mails having the last line as "Please copy this message and send it to 10 other people", or "Forward this to everyone you know!"
It promises prosperity to all who copied it and sent it on to people, and bad luck to those who "broke the chain" by failing to comply. Virtually all chain letters hold out some sort of reward for reproducing them, be it blessings, good luck, money or simply a clear conscience. There may be threats of calamity for failing to circulate the requisite number of copies, e.g., "One person did not pass this letter along and died a week later." Sometimes, they are not so rigid. Sometimes they are just fun like, you can see anyone’s driving license at
The most popular chain mail is probably the wonderful Microsoft hoax. This is a letter, which says that if you forward it to your friends, Microsoft, using its great technology will find out about it, and will send you money (about $100 or so). Supposedly, it is small change for Microsoft (very rich) and they are doing it for publicity. Of course, it is false. Microsoft had to spend a lot of time and effort convincing people that this was just a horribly successful prank. Similar hoaxes have been launched on Nokia, which would give you free cell phones for forwarding a message. The Nokia hoax was so successful that the next one was supposedly from Erricson whose hoax letter said “Our competitor Nokia is giving away free phones, so we are going to give away our latest phone, for free…”
The Email pranksters never die. The keep multiplying, with stupid tricks such as virus hoaxes. The best-known virus hoax is the email about the Good Times virus. The email warned that a very sinister virus was being sent by Email, and the virus carrying email had the phrase “Good Times” as its subject line. If you even attempted to read this email it would wipe out everything on your hard disk and render your computer unusable. So to protect yourself and your loved ones, you are to send out the warning, by email, to all those you know. And of course, if you saw the Good Times virus come to you, you better not even think about reading the message—get out of the room and use a long broom handle to move and click the mouse to delete the Email. (Last sentence is my exaggeration). People took the warning quite seriously (it was very well written, and very plausible) and did exactly what they were told “Forward it to all of your friends”. The mass scale forwarding, clogged up Email systems and spread unnecessary panic.
Let us finish with some truths that are as fascinating as the hoax. I got to know about Darwin Award from an e-mail, and thought as hoax. But then searched in Google and found this is true!!! This Award is given for people who "do a service to Humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool" (i.e., lose the ability to reproduce either by death or sterilization in an idiotic fashion). According to Wendy Northcutt, author of the Darwin Award books: "The Awards honor people who ensure the long-term survival of the human race by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." In short, the idiots who died by their foolish pranks are given this honor.
In 1996, Prakash Tewari of India got this award for being killed by the tiger in Alipore Zoo. He entered in the tiger’s den and tried to put a flower necklace on the tiger’s neck. Similar credit goes to 2009 award winner Tamera B, 22, of Louisiana who was annoyed at how slowly her boyfriend was driving. She claimed that it would be faster to walk. To prove herself, she actually opened the door of the car and stuck her foot out. Wait! Deputies of the jurisdictional Sheriff's Office stated that the car was traveling at highway at approximately 75mph (120 km/h) at the time of the accident!!!Dr. Schaaf who was a PhD tried to invent the most economic and efficient way to liquefy varnish by putting a half filled can of varnish into a toaster oven. The can immediately caught fire and our scientist tried to pull out the burning can from the 2-3 feet flame in bare hand. He became a Darwin Award nominee instead of Nobel Prize.
In 2010, one of the nominees is a South Korean handicapped man. He annoyed that an elevator closed and departed without him He stopped and thought it over before ramming his wheelchair into the doors not once, not twice, but three times in all--only to plunge down the now-empty elevator shaft to his death. Another nominee was a young couple who went on a drive in an expressway in Brasil. They decided to park the car on the middle of the road in the heavy fog for ‘Dating’. They were smashed by a cargo truck in the freeway. So far the hero of heroes was a robber who made his first and last attempt to loot money with a revolver from a really big gun shop in New York in 1990!!!
Originally written on 27 October, 2010