True Tale #1: Breaking the email Chain of Fools
When his friends kept annoying him with chain e-mails, one man paid them back with a check…. Last week she forwarded the email about flesh-eating bacteria that comes on bananas shipped from Costa Rica. “If you have eaten a banana in the last 2-3 days and come down with a fever followed by a skin infection, seek medical attention!!!” it said.
This week, she forwarded a plea from a seven-year-old dying of lung cancer. It explained that for each person who signs the list, a large foundation would donate seven cents to the little girl’s treatment. “The doctors say I will die soon if this isn't fixed, and my family can't pay the bills,” the plea said.
We all have at least one person, if not more, in our life that deserves to have her email forwarding privileges revoked. These are otherwise intelligent people whose common sense somehow seems to stop at their wrist. Without the slightest bit of discernment, they click to forward us this year’s “Top Ten Blond Jokes” or the most recent hackneyed reflection about stopping to smell the roses.
Jeff Zickgraff knows about five of these people and one week they all seemed to join forces. “I received the same chain email from each of them,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that so many people were passing along something so stupid.”
The email originated from Microsoft and said that the company was testing a new email tracking system. “For each person you send this email to you will be given $5,” it promised. “Please forward this on to as many people as possible so that both you and I can take part.” Of course, Microsoft was performing no such test and the letter is a hoax that has been around for years. But Zickgraff's friends weren't taking any chances, so they diligently forwarded it along.
Zickgraff, on the other hand, wasn’t buying it. “People figure, I’d better be safe and send this along,” he says. “But they should probably stop and think about whether it is a hoax and whether they should be helping to promote it.” And with a few clicks, Zickgraff, who works for a small software startup company in Indianapolis, found a website that verified his suspicions about the supposed Microsoft giveaway.
So he decided to teach his gullible friends a lesson.
Lifting insignias from Microsoft’s website, he designed company stationary and checks for several hundred dollars. Then he mailed them to everyone who had forwarded him the email.
“You are receiving the enclosed check because you have forwarded one of the selected messages to your friends and family,” the letter said. “Again, thank you for your participation in our on-going research. Please tell your friends and family members that you have been rewarded and that indeed, it does pay to forward our e-mails on to new recipients.”
Some of Zickgraff's friends said that they planned to deposit the check. Others just took it around the office bragging to everyone who had been skeptical, he recalls.
“I designed it pretty well but I was surprised that they fell for it,” Zickgraff says. “Then again, these are the same people who fell for the original email.”
After several delicious days basking in his friends’ foolishness, Zickgraff finally fessed up. He directed one friend's attention to the fine print on the back of the check. It said, “Please endorse only in your dreams.’”
While this website chronicles the range and diversity of the ways that people respond to life's little annoyances, it is not an endorsement of any single approach and is certainly not intended to recommend, much less to condone, dangerous or illegal activity.
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