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From the newest scientific discovery to the oldest email investment scam, we are pummeled every day with more information – make it bigger, now it’s better, get it faster, but wait, there’s more! With all of the garbage flying around, how do we figure out what’s real? How do we decide when our kids are really in danger, or if the new diet pill works, or if that talking head is really a doctor – and if she is a doctor, a doctor of what? Every day it becomes more important to be aware of in what and whom we invest our time, trust, and money.

The following is the first in a series of articles to help yourself or the ones you love learn how to think critically about everyday issues from email hoaxes to diet commercials.

Virtual Reality Check

Have you checked your junk mail folder lately? There are pills for what ails you, dating sites, and investment opportunities from dubious “princelings”. A quick search in Google shows a variety of estimates of the waste of fake email, from wasted electricity and bandwidth to actual cash loss of $10 billion or more, and estimates that junk email makes up anywhere from 60 to 95% of all email. Sure, we’ve mostly learned to avoid these internet annoyances and a good spam filter means we rarely have to see another ad for a Viagra knockoff, but what about our nearest and dearest – the best friend or dear sibling who sends those hilarious pictures and heart-warming tales? Are they secretly plotting to spam us too?

Well, probably not. Our loved ones have the best of intentions. They want to warn us of danger, help find a missing child, or let us know about the latest virus, whether electronic or biological. But all too often – and completely unintentionally – they are simply forwarding more junk mail. And for those few alerts that might have ever been real, most are out of date and have been circling around and around the internet for years.

How can you tell if an email is likely to be a hoax or a scam? Here are a few clues to watch out for, thanks to hoax-slayer.com and about.com:

1.    It asks you to forward the email to everyone you know.
2.    It doesn’t provide any sources or places to confirm the content.
3.    It is excessively emotional, littered with all caps, bold print and color; or, alternatively, uses very dense, technical language.
4.    It claims to reveal urgent or important information that you haven’t heard mentioned through any legitimate source of news.

Still, sometimes these messages just seem to ring true and it’s hard to tell if we should buy into the scare. Fortunately, there are a few places to check that specialize in researching internet and email hoaxes. They do the research so we don’t have to. (How do we know if we can trust these sources? Well, more on that a bit later, but the sites listed here are well-known and frequently recommended sources of information – that is, frequently recommended by legitimate news sources.) Here are a couple of my favorite hoax-busting websites:

• Snopes at www.snopes.com
• Hoaxbusters at www.hoaxbusters.org
• About.com at www.urbanlegends.about.com

These sites are easy to use and it only takes a few minutes to check out a suspicious email. Here’s an example of one that I did myself a couple of years ago. I had received an email from a concerned relative about a serial killer who was luring women to open their door late at night by playing the recording of a crying baby. The email urgently warned me to NEVER OPEN MY DOOR if I heard a CRYING BABY – NO MATTER WHAT!! It also encouraged me to send the email to every woman that I know. It had several of the hallmarks listed above such as the dramatic language, the use of all caps, and only vague information about the source. The email didn’t, for instance, even mention the geographical area that this supposed serial killer was operating in, as if the killer could strike one day in Texas and then appear at my own door in Florida on the next.

So, what do you do with an email like this? You want to be safe, but something just sounds fishy, or you want more information. Pick your favorite hoax checking website – at the time I went to Snopes.com. You’ll generally find a list of popular or recent hoaxes and urban legends on one side and a series of categories you can search in the middle of the page. There is also a large search box at the very top of the page. Take a key word or name from the email – in my case I entered “crying baby” and “murder” – then click the search button. A list of hits will come up on the next page. Mine was the first one on the list, an urban legend about a Baton Rogue serial killer who lured women into opening their doors by use of a baby’s cry on tape. It turns out that the tale was a couple of years old, from around 2003, had supposedly been related to the case of a real serial killer, but that no information about a crying baby had ever been brought up by the police or the media. Snopes listed the story as “false” and provided some background information on how they figured out that it wasn’t true, plus some information on old urban legends that were similar to this one.

So, before you hit that button to forward another Important Warning to your friends list, take a minute for a reality check and make sure that the information is real. Stop the spread of useless spam and save an electronic tree!

For more information on how to spot email fakes and other internet hoaxes, also check out www.hoax-slayer.com.

Article for next time: As Seen on TV!

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