An absence of malice (or rational thought)
Ho hum. I sometimes despair at the gullibility of supposedly intelligent people. I know they're only acting with good intentions, but I do wonder sometimes.
Another chain letter just got revived again, this time warning of HIV infected needles being deliberately embedded in cinema seats in the Midlands, and around the country. Naturally, like all such chain letters which exhort "pass this immediately to everyone in your address book", it is utterly bogus, as just even a moment's rational analysis would confirm. Like all chain letters, this particular hoax bears the classic hallmarks, relying as it does on the willingness of people to set aside their normal critical analysis of information coming from a trusted source (i.e. a person's own friends and trusted professional contacts).
Firstly, the message claims the stamp of authenticity from credible sources, which 99 people out of 100 will simply assume are legitimate. The recipient fails to bother checking on the grounds that no-one would make such an easily dispelled false claim. WRONG! That is the very foundation of all successful confidence tricks! The simple, unchecked, bold-faced lie.
Secondly, the message goes on to build a superficially plausible lie on the bones of the truth that most people will have heard of. Taking this needle warning as our example, again, back in 1998, a certain miscreant was placing needles behind prostitute's stickers in the West End of London in the hopes it would scare cleaning staff away from removing them. Said miscreant was caught, prosecuted, and is now serving a prison sentence. There have been no other reports of similar incidents since. Certainly there are no public records of the incident the message claims to be reporting.
In the third instance, at least some of detail of the incident - names, places, dates - are vague. In this instance the victim is cited as "a person", and the time as "a couple of weeks ago". Making the date vague gives the message additional longevity - each new (credulous) recipient will treat it as current and topical, whereas if a specific date were mentioned, the currency of the message would eventually expire. By not identifying the victim, it makes a cursory check of the facts all the more difficult, again aiding the longevity of the hoax.
Finally - and this is the real killer - it demands in almost hysterical terms that the reader should immediately distribute the warning far and wide for the safety of the recipients' own loved ones. Just take a moment to think. Most people who have e-mail check it once, twice, maybe even 3 times a day. That being the case, and with distribution being so urgent, wouldn't it make more sense for the warning to go out on broadcast media, where it reaches a wider audience, faster? How come it got to you in an e-mail relayed over several days through countless strangers' hands, without reaching the news first?
Whenever you receive a chain letter, think twice before forwarding it. Actually, no. Think a dozen times. Does it really make sense, or are you just the victim of a time and resource-wasting hoax? Check out //www.snopes.com for a good authoritative collection of modern urban legends and e-mail hoaxes. Above all, though, whatever your choice, don't bother forwarding it to me.
What bothers me most is not that people fall victim to these hoaxes (some repeatedly), but that there are deranged people who derive satisfaction from maliciously starting them. Why? If I'm a musing madman, then what the heck are they?
