Urban legends outlawed ... April Fools'!

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

Can you believe it?  Forward an e-mail from the Ericsson Company to eight friends and you’ll get a free laptop. April Fools'!

Did you hear? The comedian Sinbad recently died of a heart attack, but it was never reported in the news. April Fools'!

Check this out! Pour some Coca-Cola on a piece of raw pork and watch the worms crawl out. April Fools'!

Thanks to the Internet, every day is April Fools' Day. There are literally thousands of myths like these circulating in cyberspace. Unlike the malicious messages sent by cyber-thieves — designed to steal your personal information — these hoax e-mails simply spread rumors and false information.

Some of the bogus messages can be scary, like the one that warns that lead has been found in some major brands of lipstick. The FDA says it’s not true.

Others are just silly. Did you hear that a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” couldn’t decide if an elephant or the moon was larger? It never happened. According to Snopes.com, one of the best myth-busting sites, the photo that accompanies the bogus e-mail is also a hoax — digitally altered to validate the bogus story.

Myths just keep on coming
New hoaxes hit the Internet every week. Snopes says the e-mail alert that Sesame Street is replacing Cookie Monster with Veggie Monster is false. The widely circulated photos of “painted” cats are amazing, but they were all created on a computer. The e-mail calling for Americans to boycott the new U.S. dollar coin because it was designed without the words “In God We Trust” is also not true. 

How do these things get started? Some are written by people who want to warn others about a real problem and just get their facts wrong. But myth-busters say hoaxes usually are done by people just wanting to have a little fun. “They’re playing jokes or seeing what they can do,” says Audri Lanford, co-founder of Scambusters.org.

Audri and her husband Jim started the site back in 1994. They’ve been tracking Internet myths and urban legends ever since.

“Everything that was going around then is still going around now,” she tells me. “Nothing dies.”

One of the first e-mail myths I remember started in 1997. It was supposedly from Bill Gates, who had written a new program to trace forwarded e-mail.

“Forward this to everyone you know,” the message said, “and if it reaches 1,000 people, everyone on the list will receive $1,000 at my expense.”

Lanford tells me this Gates myth is not only alive nearly 10 years later — it’s one of the most popular ones they see.

According to Snopes, there are at least 29 variations of this “tracking program” e-mail, naming companies such as AOL, Coca-Cola, Disney, The Gap, J. Crew, Honda, M&M Mars, Nike, and Victoria’s Secret. All are bogus.

At Hoaxbusters.org, a site run by the U.S. Department of Energy, Bill Orvis has been debunking e-mail myths for 13 years. He says once a rumor has been released “it just keeps coming back.”

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