Okay, first things first. If you have an e-mail account, then you must be familiar with emails like Bill Gates sharing his fortune, Microsoft’s lottery promotion, someone in Nigeria requesting you to be a partner to transfer massive amount of money to his account and many more. How many of you have ever believed these e-mails to be true and took further initiatives like providing required details in the e-mails (in case of Microsoft lottery) or forwarding the mails to your friends (in case of Bill Gates fortune) as said in them. Many people have fallen prey to these false e-mails otherwise known as Hoax e-mails. A hoax e-mails is something that is not true but create an impression that it is real. Here are a few of them.
1. Olympic Torch: This e-mail warns you about a virus which opens an Olympic torch on your computer and consequently burns the C drive on your hard disk. Watch out. Yours may be burnt too!
2. Hotmail hoax: This e-mail tells that due to large number of sign-ups for hotmail, it is running out of resources so if someone does not receive this e-mail in his inbox within a month’s time, his account will be deleted. This is to find out which users are using their hotmail account. Alas I am still able to access my hotmail!!!
3. Nokia Is Giving Away Phones For free: This e-mail claims that Nokia is doing a word of mouth promotion for its product and if you send this mail to X number of people and also a copy to a nokia e-mail ID then you will be able to receive a phone.
4. Missing child: There are several of this kind. These e-mails usually contains a picture of a girl or a guy and claim that they are missing. Passing the e-mails may eventually be read by someone who can then find the girl.
5. E-mail lottery: One of the rapidly circulating lottery e-mail is Microsoft award promotion lottery by Microsoft UK. And this e-mail has fooled many people to believe that they have indeed won a lottery and they send the required details as requested by mail.
6. Bill Gates fortune: This tells that Microsoft and AOL is jointly running a beta test where Microsoft is going to give away $245 for each copy of e-mail sent from your account. Bill Gates is obviously not so rich to waste his money like this.
7. Orkut is closing: A lady called Dianna addresses this e-mail to Orkut users that Orkut is no longer having any name space so they are going to terminate the account of inactive users. Afterwards Orkut will be a paid service. Nothing has happened to anyone who didn’t follow the advice given in the email.
8. Huge amount of money in foreign account: This kind of e-mail has many variations. Usually a manager of any bank will be telling that he discovered an abandoned account with a huge sum of money and he needs a foreign partner to transfer this money. I receive atleast 4-5 of this kind daily. Weird!!weird!!weird!!
9. Beautiful mummy: This can be classified as a chain letter rather than a hoax e-mail. it has a picture of a girl which the e-mail claims to be a dead baby which is 80 year old now and still looks alive. This e-mail tells to forward it to X number of people to bring good luck failing which it will bring bad luck and it also gives some example on how people got benefitted by forwarding it.
10. Enter reverse ATM PIN to dial the police: This is the most absurd and funny hoax of all. The e-mail tells you that if you are ever forced to withdraw money from ATM, then you can enter the PIN in the reverse. This would dial a nearby police station and the police will come to your rescue.
