The e-mail “WARNING” starts with a plausible bit of authority. But it’s soon evident that another leg-puller lurks in cyberspace.
“The Institute for the Investigation of Irregular Internet Phenomena announced today that many Internet users are becoming infected by a new virus that causes them to believe without question every groundless story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their inbox or on their browser. The Gullibility Virus …”
Computer experts who tangle with hackers spreading viruses and other mischief on the Internet sometimes believe the Gullibility Virus is real. Energy Department security specialist William Orvis had to create a Hoaxbusters Web site to cope with an onslaught of alarmed callers.
“More than half our time was being spent just answering questions about these things,” said Orvis, who works at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
His response reflects an emerging reality of the Internet age: E-mail makes it easier than ever to set loose urban legends, malicious rumors, chain letters, jokes and other hoaxes.
Like fire ants, a Web-born hoax can be almost impossible to kill. With the Internet spreading so rapidly, a new audience of the unwary and unwitting comes online every few months.
Most anti-virus companies have put together Web sites or links to e-mail hoax archives to try to lighten the load for their security teams.
Congress, the Canadian Parliament, the U.S. Postal Service and Canada Post Corp. have spent more than 18 months swatting down a hoax e-mail claiming one or the other of them plans to slap 5 cents postage on all e-mails.
The hoax got its start in April 1999, probably as an April Fool’s joke. A Canadian participant in a software development discussion group, hosted on a Web site run by an Arizona engineer named Bill Myers, posted a warning that Canada’s Parliament was considering postage for all e-mail.
Within minutes, Myers said, the message was rocketing through Canada. Some discussion group contributors were so angry they vowed to leave Canada if the bill became law.
Within six hours, Myers heard from Canada Post that the story was a hoax and ran a notice on his Web site to that effect. But it is still spreading.
Current versions of the e-mail postage hoax claim a Republican congressman (the Canadian version is a Liberal member of Parliament) named “Schnell” or “Tony Schnell” is behind the legislation, while a valiant lawyer named Richard Stepp works to derail it.
There are no Schnells in Congress or the Canadian Parliament. No lawyer named Stepp is lobbying the postal or technology committees of either legislative body.
The bill number cited in the story (602P) does not exist. Canada Post, the U.S. Postal Service and even some members of Congress have put denials on their Web sites.
Yet thousands of Internet users have called complaining about the supposed postal plot. Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House postal service subcommittee, last year said he got more calls from constituents about the e-mail stamp than any issue except President Clinton’s impeachment.
E-mail hoaxes flourish because they are easy to spread and hard to trace, said David Emery, a writer and folklore expert who has studied e-mail hoaxes since 1997.
“The most virulent and long-lived rumors are the ones that exploit valid fears and concerns of the public. This is true of folklore generally,” Emery said.
“Many urban legends … touch on people’s fear of violence or disease. Now we have types of folklore indigenous to the Internet, and these resolve around issues like security and access–specifically, whether or not it will remain affordable for the average person.”
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Emery’s Web site (http://urbanlegends.about.com) holds a vast collection of these phony warnings and pranks. Some of the more persistent themes deal with poisonous spiders lurking under toilet seats and atheists forcing the federal government to cancel television shows with religious themes.
“The Internet makes new demands on us because we’re all publishers now, in a sense,” Emery said. “The concept of taking responsibility for information you choose to share with other people is a new one, but absolutely essential in the digital age.”
Orvis, the federal “hoaxbuster” whose Web site features a court jester inside a red ring with a slash across it (http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org), said e-mail hoaxes are like “manual viruses” spread voluntarily by their recipients.
“We’re filling our hard drives with these hoax messages and then dealing them off to our friends,” he said.
Hoaxes become legal issues when they involve chain letters asking for money–a violation of the postal laws–or when they libel a person. Orvis said one e-mail hoax involved a fake advertisement for a child pornography site that was sent out under the signature of a man who had nothing to do with the topic.
“He had to change everything–phone number, e-mail, he even moved,” Orvis said. “People can get really hurt by these.”
Rob Rosenberger, an Iowa computer security specialist who maintains a Web site dealing with virus rumors (www.vmyths.com), said he has seen a couple of shaky security firms launch their own hoaxes to drum up business.
One company issued an e-mail security alert about a mythical virus and then touted its own virus-stopping product–for $39.95, marked down from $99.95.
“Whether we’re getting more gullible or getting more gullible people on the Internet, I don’t know,” Rosenberger said. “Old hoaxes never die, they just get a new life cycle.”