The Wired Minute – Tip of the Day

Recently I got an email from a trusted friend who undoubtedly sent it with the greatest intentions. According to the email “Bill Gates and AOL are teaming up” the email said “to test a new beta email tracking program, but they need your help. Simply forward this on to everyone in your address book and within two weeks they’ll send you a big, fat check! Trust me, my friend is really a lawyer, they know the law…”

For those that have been the recipient, and unwitting participant in this scam, how much was your check for? Oh… you never got it? I’m sorry. Maybe your email address was overlooked. Hey, what was the name of the lawyer friend mentioned in the email? Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good case against AOL and Microsoft! (Or not.)

How can you tell if it’s not real? Well, to start off with, there are some red-flags that should tip you off to it being a scam:

1. As Ray Romano once said, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” well it is true “then it can’t be very good!” I’m sorry, but there won’t be any checks in the mail. Check and see if it’s an urban legend before you even think or forwarding this type of thing (in this case check out http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm for all the details).
2. Ambiguity reigns supreme in emails (or websites, or instant messages, or [insert some type of communication here]). The less factual and/or verifiable information that you’re given, the harder it is to verify the validity of a claim, and therefore, the less respect you should give it. You should either delete it or try and verify it (use your favorite search engine, such as Google, and see if others have commented about it). In this case, one would suppose that AOL and Microsoft would have press releases on this sort of thing to gain support, yet the only press releases I could find from these companies point to the fact that this is a scam.
   1. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/hoax/05-13hoax.asp
   2. http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1998Essay/3-25col.asp

So if it’s not real, what does this sort of email do?

1. Primarily, it serves as a way to collect email addresses, in the chain that I got there were over 100 unique address (that’s not too many, in prior versions of this hoax I’ve have to stop counting at over 2,500). Why should that worry you? All of those people now how all of each others email addresses and can do anything they want with them. Maybe that doesn’t worry you, but eventually the hoaxster will get a copy of the email back and then they’ll have bunch more valid email addresses to sell to spammers. But presently you don’t get enough spam, right? Depending on which study you refer to, spam makes up around 80% of all email in the world (more so in the USA). That’s a lot of wasted time, resources, and if you’re a business owner, a lot of wasted money on equipment, bandwidth, and paying employees to read/sift through spam to get to their real work.
2. This is even more dangers than the first. If you do not immediately delete and empty your email program’s trash can, if you get infected by a virus, worm, Trojan, spyware, adware, malware, or any number of icky thing, those programs love to go through not only your address book but also every single email address that they can find in your email box. Then they use this information to send copies of themselves to all those unwitting people! To put it simply, by participating in this sort of hoax, you are putting your friends, you co-workers, family members, and the Internet in general at a much higher risk! You don’t want to be the person that indirectly caused Grandma Ellen to loose all the pictures of her grandkids, the life-histories or her ancestors that she had just finished writing, and the legendary recipe for apple pie that she’d just typed into the computer so she could get rid of the box of 3”x5” cards that were falling apart! Okay, you get the point.
3. People react to this sort of message differently. Which category do you fall into?
   1. White-hats: I’m a white hat. I like to educate and help people learn. I do no evil and have no malicious intent.
   2. Black-hats: Even if they weren’t the originator of the email, they now have tools at their disposal to do nasty things. These people love to tinker with technology, don’t care who gets hurt, and want to experiment (in this case they’re experimenting on everyone that you just sent that email to). You don’t give a child a sword and not expect someone to get cut.
   3. No-Hats: These people don’t know who they are, or that hats even exist, they just go about their day completely ignorant to the perils of the world around them. These people are the primate equivalent of lemmings. True, ignorance is bliss, but not if it hurts people around you.

So, be careful out there, use the greatest information source in the world to find out if forwarding that message will do more harm than good.