Chain Mail Hoaxes
We've all received email about free money, children who desperately need our help, and other items designed to play on your sympathy or fear to get you to forward the message to everyone you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. Some may try to deceive you into giving out personal and financial information. These hoaxes don't get delivered just by email. Posts on social networking sites, text messages on phones, and instant messages can also be used to send these hoaxes by scammers or an unsuspecting victim.
Chain mail includes a request that each recipient send out multiple copies of the letter to more people, so its circulation can increase exponentially. Chain mail can potentially waste great amounts of bandwidth and clog up networks, causing problems for people trying to do legitimate work.
How to Recognize a Chain Letter
Chain letters and most hoax messages all have a similar pattern. From the older printed letters to the newer electronic kind, they all have three recognizable parts: hook, threat, and request.
- The hook catches your interest and gets you to read the rest of the letter such as "Make Money Fast", "Get Rich", or similar statements related to making money for little or no work. Other hooks like "Danger!", "Virus Alert", or "A Little Girl Is Dying" tie into our sympathy or fears.
- When you're hooked, the threat warns you about the terrible things that will happen if you don't maintain the chain. Others play on greed or sympathy to get you to pass on the letter. The threat often contains official or technical sounding language to get you to believe it is real.
- The chain letter requests you to "Distribute this letter to as many people as possible." This should raise a red flag that the warning is probably a hoax. No real warning message from a credible source will tell you to send this to everyone you know.
Chain letters usually don't include the name and contact information of the original sender, especially if sent via an instant message or on a social networking site. It is probably impossible to check on its authenticity. Legitimate warnings and solicitations sent via email will always have complete contact information from the person sending the message and could be signed with a cryptographic signature, such as PGP to assure its authenticity.
If a chain letters does have a person's name and contact information, that person usually does not exist or does not have anything to do with the hoax message. To check on a hoax message, try going to the person's web page or the person's company web page, or visit the hoax listings sites provided below to see if the message has already been declared a hoax.
How You Should Respond
When In Doubt, Don't Send It Out!
Don't forward chain emails or letters. Sending chain mail is an inappropriate use of university computer systems and networks. It ties up computing resources and could prevent legitimate university business from taking place.
Additional Help
Most antivirus companies have a web page containing information about most known viruses and hoaxes. Other useful virus and hoax sites are listed below.