Chain of Foolery on the Internet

	Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
	Charles Hymes runs a nonprofit Web site that exposes online hoaxes.

Next, the good news: the Federal Government is not going to start charging for each e-mail message. And that dying English boy of 10 years ago who was trying to collect enough get-well cards to make the record books? He actually got well, thank you very much. Well enough to wish that he and a variety of charities were not still getting cards.

Hoaxes can spread through the Internet faster than viruses, to which they have been compared. They are more tenacious in some ways because they are passed on by every new person to get online and they mutate freely. And with just a few clicks in your address book, it is easy to forward a chain letter, a virus warning or a list of specious True Facts. It is harder to figure out which messages are true, especially when many people check their powers of critical thinking at their Internet portals. As Joe Wells of Antivirus Online (www.av.ibm.com) said, "Thoughts travel faster in a vacuum."

It would seem to be easy enough to avoid what has been termed the gullibility virus, by just deleting any e-mail that smells like a hoax. But few people, especially those who are new to the Internet, can resist the urge to forward a message about the need, say, to send around a picture of an angel made out of repeated keyboard symbols to insure good luck.

While forwarding such e-mail might seem harmless, consider what would happen if everybody did it.

"If each of the so-called good Samaritans sends the letter on to only 10 other people (most send to huge mailing lists), the ninth resending results in a billion e-mail messages, thereby clogging the network and interfering with the receiving of legitimate e-mail," according to the Computer Incident Advisory Capability Web site (ciac.llnl.gov/ciac) of the Department of Energy, where hoaxes, false virus warnings and chain letters are listed.

One chain letter or hoax may seem harmless but can quickly propagate into billions of copies.

One Internet hoax resulted in death threats against a man whose name was falsely attached to the online sale of T-shirts with offensive slogans about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Someone on America Online posted the name of the man, Kenneth Zeran, and his home telephone number on a bulletin board with an advertisement for "Naughty Oklahoma T-shirts." Zeran was not selling any such shirts. (He eventually sued AOL in a Federal court; the suit was dismissed there, and Zeran lost on appeal.)

Of course, hoaxes are born every minute, and they have been around since the computer was an abacus.

Take, for example, the fraud perpetrated by one Lozier in 1824, who convinced hundreds of New Yorkers that all the new construction around Wall Street was making Manhattan bottom-heavy and that therefore the island needed to be sawed off at the northern end, towed out to sea, turned around and reattached, or it would tip and sink. More than 300 men signed up for the project, according to contemporary accounts collected by Rick Brown, Webmaster of the History Buff's Home Page, which includes a list of great hoaxes (www.historybuff.com).

GULLIBILITY THRIVES ONLINE E-Z Tenure Chain letter offers professors a quick route to job security. A Taxing Issue Phantom legislation would tax Canadian e-mail. Mickey Mouse Offer Try Microsoft products, go to Disneyland. Web Cobwebs The Internet cleans itself up. It even does Windows. Going Postal The postal service puts its stamp on e-mail. Don't Ask, Just Do It Send messages, get free footwear. Killing With Kindness Get-well cards are the best revenge.

Some hoaxes are not born, however, but made from what begins as a legitimate e-mail letter. In Hubbards, a rural fishing town in Nova Scotia, Glynda Wimmer's fifth-grade class at Mill Cove District School decided, as a geography project, to send e-mail to a total of 15 family members and friends, asking them to reply with their geographic locations and to forward the message to their own friends, asking them to do the same.

All was fine at first (except that the class's computer was soon overloaded with e-mail). But then two people called from Florida to say they had received obscene replies from the school. It turned out that someone had altered the return address on the original message, routing mail to an account that generated rude responses. The school was able to fix the problem soon after it was discovered.

The sick-child hoax has also been mischievously modified. Originally, Craig Shergold, a 10-year-old with brain cancer, tried to get in the Guinness Book of Records for receiving the most get-well cards. His efforts, and his surgery, were successful, but he and several children's-last-wish charities are still receiving cards.

His story also lives on in various permutations, one naming "Timothy Flight" as the sick child. "Someone took the name Timothy Flight and replaced it with an actual kid at an actual high school in Pittsburgh," said David Emery, the guide to urban legends and folklore for the About.com search site. "Apparently the guy who perpetrated the hoax was jealous of this kid because they were both in love with the same girl." The family of the Pittsburgh child has put out public requests for people to stop calling them to see if he actually needs get-well cards, Emery said.

TRACKING HOAXES Don't Spread That Hoax: http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/hoax.html Includes a listing of possible hoaxes that are still being checked out. Hoaxes and Urban Legends: www0.delphi.com/navnet/legends/legends.html Includes a section on how to detect hoaxes. Computer Incident Advisory Capability: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ This is from the Department of Energy and includes up-to-date warnings and sections on chain letters and hoaxes (as well as viruses.) About.com/Urban Legends and Folklore: urbanlegends.about.com: Tracks current Web hoaxes; message boards are included. Hoax Kill www.hoaxkill.com Helps people track hoaxes and will track the recipients of a hoax and notify them about the deception.

Besides jealousy, motives for hoaxes include the ageless desire to pull a fast one and the hope of foiling spammers (by sending, for example, an e-mail message falsely asserting that any e-mail with the subject "Make Money Fast" contains a virus so people won't read it).

Financial gain can be a motive, too. In April, the share price of a company called Pairgain Technologies increased by 30 percent in a few hours after a false report that the company was being bought was posted on a personal Web site.

The stock price eventually went back down -- after the report was debunked, but presumably not before someone made a lot of money.

Emery sees larger motives for telling improbable tales and disseminating them. People like to scare themselves, he said, whether they are gazing at a campfire or into the glow of a computer screen.

They also like to unite against the behemoths of the business world.

"There's just a general spirit of hating big corporations," Emery said. (Hence all those rumors about Nike giving away free clothes to everyone who forwards a particular e-mail message.) "When you start to scratch the surface and challenge the information," he added, "people are so convinced that big corporations are evil that they won't let go of a specific rumor, even if you can prove it to be false."

Besides, the people who start hoaxes are almost assured of anonymity, for better or worse, because verification of a letter's authenticity is nearly impossible.

"If you really want to believe in the chain letter, you should be able to click through to some U.R.L. and be able to verify it through some independent source," said Rob Rosenberger, who runs the Web site www.kumite.com, which dispels myths about computer viruses. "But I can easily concoct a Web site that would 'validate' a chain letter."

Related Article Steps to Take: If Things Seem Too Good, or Bad, Be Suspicious (June 1, 1999)

"Lots of people have tried to trace an e-mail back to the original," Emery said, "but it just has to get a generation or two beyond the original and the original is lost. You can't get caught doing it, or I don't think anyone has so far."

And justice is hard to come by if you or your business has been the victim of an anonymous hoaxer. Internet service providers are not responsible for the information posted on their bulletin boards or flung through the gossip mill of e-mail.

Charles Hymes, a Hewlett-Packard engineer who runs a nonprofit Web site that exposes hoaxes www.nonprofit.net/hoax/hoax.html tenure. I've still seen this circulating years later, in different incarnations."

Other hoaxes have mutated as well. Electronic rumors that the Postal Service would soon start charging a 5-cent fee for every piece of e-mail eventually developed a Canadian strain, which urged e-mail recipients to lobby members of Parliament to vote against taxing e-mail, though no such legislation was in the works.

Rosenberger calls that an example of "E-Darwinism." "The speed of e-mail and its incessant forwarding capability make it easier to evolve," he said.

• Antivirus Online

• Charles Hymes' Web site

• About.com: Current Net Hoaxes

• The Department of Energy's CIAC Web site

• Kumite.com

• Historybuff.com