Hoaxbusters Don't be fooled by online scams By Erfert Fenton When you go to your Mail Inbox, you can be thankful that the junk mail filter has been working behind the scenes, weeding out unsolicited ads, scams, and spam. With that and a bit of judicious e-mail management, such as creating a known senders list, you can help keep your Inbox free of unwanted mail from people you don't know. If you're like me, however, you frequently receive unwanted mail from people you do know.

Here's an excerpt from a message that was recently forwarded to me by a dear friend:

"I WAS SENT AN E-MAIL AT WORK ABOUT SOMEONE WALKING UP TO YOU AT MALLS OR PARKING LOTS AND ASKING YOU TO SNIFF PERFUME THEY ARE SELLING AT A CHEAP PRICE. THIS ISN'T REALLY PERFUME BUT ETHER, AND YOU WILL PASS OUT AND THEY TAKE YOUR WALLET AND ALL YOUR VALUABLES…. THIS IS TRUE!! REMEMBER TO PASS THIS ON!!!!!"

My friend means well. I'm glad that she wants to make sure I don't get etherized and robbed in a parking lot. But I felt obliged to send her a note reminding her (for this was not the first cautionary tale she'd sent me) that this e-mail has many of the earmarks of an urban legend:

1. The e-mail didn't mention the names of any women who had been victimized by the perfume/ether ring. A surefire way to spot an urban legend is that it happened to, say, somebody that your friend's cousin's boyfriend heard about.
2. Similarly, the story isn't from an established news source like a newspaper or a wire service. It's simply presented as a true story.
3. This one was in all capital letters, with lots of exclamation points. Always a bad sign! (Wretched spelling and grammar are other telltale signs of tall tales.)

As usual, I told my friend to check out this story — and any others she plans to distribute in the future — on my favorite hoax-debunking site, www.snopes.com. The folks at Snopes tirelessly research legends, hoaxes, scams, and the like, and write them up in an informative and entertaining way.

To check out the story mentioned here, you'd go to snopes.com and search for "perfume" and "ether." Or, you could look in the Crime category, under Warnings. Either way, you'll find a dissertation on why the perfume tale smells a little funny.

Urban-legend emails are pretty harmless — but they waste people's time, clutter their inboxes, and can cause their readers to fret needlessly.

While Snopes.com makes for some entertaining reading, there's a darker side to e-mail hoaxes. For example, a few weeks ago I received an e-mail that claimed to be from PayPal, the popular online financial service. Because I have a PayPal account, I opened the official-looking message (complete with a PayPal logo), which informed me that PayPal was conducting routine security maintenance and needed to verify some information. This sounded reasonable, but then I read the part that asked me to verify my identity as a PayPal customer by entering my PayPal user name and password. Red flag! PayPal (or eBay, or MSN TV, or your bank, or most reputable businesses) will never send you an e-mail that requests sensitive information such as an account number or password. If you enter this information, chances are it will go to someone who will use it to access your account.

Sure enough, if you go to Snopes.com and search for "PayPal," you'll find information on this and similar scams. (You can also go to PayPal's site for tips on spotting fake e-mails and websites.) Snopes has a category called Fraud & Scams where you can learn about "phishing" — the art of using e-mail to fraudulently collect personal information. Another section, called Inboxer Rebellion, lists common e-mail scams.

In conclusion, don't believe everything you read. If an e-mail claims you'll get a free product just by forwarding the e-mail to 10 friends … you won't. If a note asking for your Social Security number claims to be from the IRS … it isn't. If you're not sure whether an e-mail's for real, call the organization that allegedly sent it, and see whether it really is from that organization (if the e-mail asks for account numbers or other such information, it probably isn't). And if someone walks up to you in a parking lot and asks you to sniff a perfume sample … well, that's up to you.
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