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.

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


 * 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.