The Giant Grizzly Bear Winning Notification (Lotto Scam)
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World's Tallest Woman
Cordially,
Posted on 01/06/2006 9:13:31 AM PST by Sen Jack S. Fogbound
Top 10 Net Hoaxes / Urban Legends of 2005
From David Emery,Your Guide to Urban Legends and Folklore.
It's time to look back on 2005 — an eventful twelve months by any measure — and revisit the Top 10 Net Hoaxes and Urban Legends of the year.
As in 2004, contenders were ranked according to reader interest and longevity as gauged by email submissions, page views and search queries from January through December. Predictably, a number of the most popular email forwards were "golden oldies" from previous years, so a modest amount of subjective culling was required to make room for both old and new.
It was a year marked by catastrophic natural disasters and their aftermaths, two of which in particular — 2004's Christmas tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina — dominated news coverage and fueled the engines of rumor and hearsay worldwide. So pervasive was the social impact of these events that related Netlore of all kinds — desperate pleas for help both sincere and insincere, gut-wrenching images both real and unreal, and accounts of human deeds both noble and ignoble — continued to circulate for many months afterward.
In other respects it was business as usual in that quirky parallel dimension referred to as contemporary folklore. There was rampant speculation, for example, concerning a particular female pop star's "true" gender. Thousands upon thousands of people spammed their friends with a message promising big bucks from Bill Gates for helping him test his "email tracking" program. And, for the fourth year running, a nonexistent little girl named Penny Brown went missing in Texas — or was it Ottawa? Zimbabwe? Ohio?
Correct answer: all of the above.
You get the idea. Without further ado, here, in ascending order of popularity, are the Top 10 Net Hoaxes and Urban Legends of 2005:
10. SaveToby.com Never, to my knowledge, has a cute little fluffy bunny been so cruelly — or profitably — used. Condemned to the stewpot unless his anonymous keepers received at least $50,000 in online "donations" by June 30, 2004, Toby the rabbit became an instant cause celebre, even though the Web site erected in his name showed every indication of being a hoax. Was anyone truly surprised when the geniuses holding Toby for ransom postponed the date of his demise to benefit their book deal? Can "Save Toby: The Movie" be far behind?
9. A Tsunami Orphan's Plea for Help Sadly, the story of Sophia Michl, a 10-year-old girl orphaned in Phuket, Thailand by the December 26, 2004 tsunami, turned out not to be a hoax. After her photo was posted on the Phuket Hospital Web site it found its way to inboxes all over the world, eventually catching the attention of an acquaintance. Though she was quickly reunited with surviving family members in Europe, Sophia's picture continues to circulate via email to this day.
8. Penny Brown Is Missing ... Still! "Missing" since 2001, 9-year-old Penny Brown may well be the most famous little girl who never existed. Four years later, the fictional plea on her behalf still exhorts readers to send news of her whereabouts to an equally fictional email address, zicozicozico@hotmail.com. Will this chain letter ever die? Regrettablly, it seems there'a about as much chance of that as there is of Penny Brown being found.
7. New Orleans Croc(k) Authorities predicted alligator sightings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but photographs of an (allegedly) 21-foot-long monster crocodile (allegedly) captured in the flooded streets of New Orleans exceeded everyone's wildest expectations. Oddly enough, it also looked exactly like the monster crocodile captured and photographed in the Republic of the Congo one year before. Coincidence?
6. Pulled Over by a Fake Cop? Dial *677 for the Real Thing! Nothing beats a horror story for staying power, and this one, despite the odd revision or two, is still frightening people into clicking their Forward buttons three years after it was first written up as an email. Not that the tale of "Lauren," a college student who cleverly used her mobile phone to escape the clutches of a rapist impersonating a police officer, is necessarily false — it could well be true, or at least partially true. But you can't expect a special emergency number set aside for citizens of Ontario, Canada to work if you live in, say, Virginia, can you?
5. Ciara's Sex-Change Operation Among the most popular search queries here all year long was the question "Is Ciara a man?" — which may seem nonsensical if you've ever seen the voluptuous "crunk" singer perform onstage, but it's a quandary that nevertheless gripped a great many fans in 2005, apparently. The answer — from the diva's own mouth — is no, by the way. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis was unavailable for comment.
4. Telemarketers Want Your Cell Phone Number Let there be no doubt, the only thing Americans hate more than unsolicited calls from telemarketers is the prospect of receiving them via cell phone. Sparked by announced plans to compile a universal 411 directory of private numbers, this email alert urging recipients to add their mobile phone information to the National Do Not Call Registry hasn't lost an ounce of steam since it went into circulation in late 2004.
3. Photos of Hurricane Katrina's Approach This set of ominously beautiful images of massive storm formations was circulated under the pretense of documenting Hurricane Katrina's deadly landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi in September, but when we tracked down the photographer he told us the photos had actually been taken the previous year in locales far removed from Katrina's path.
2. Bill Gates Will Pay You for Forwarding This!!! Eight years old and annoying as ever, the Microsoft "email tracking" hoax, in all its many variants, must be the most forwarded prank message of all time. The secret of its success? None of the folks forwarding it know it's a prank. It is gullibility to this degree that gives proof to the old Internet saying, "There's a sucker born every nanosecond."
1. The Deadly Wave At this point it should come as no surprise that one of the most widely shared photographs of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004 also turned out to be the phoniest. Which is too bad, because despite the collage-like quality of the image and its implausibility, it was also breathtaking in a larger-than-life, "The Day After Tomorrow" kind of way.
Dishonorable Mentions:
Attack of the Camel Spiders
The Giant Grizzly Bear Winning Notification (Lotto Scam)
World's Tallest Woman
I can't believe anyone would that gullible.
I have to run now, as I have to wire money to this nice lady in Nigeria, so she can get her millions out of the bank and share it with me.
;)
Hmmm...I think the pictures of a Chinese Tidal Bore (a regular occurance during High Tide on one river in China) passed off as Tsunami Pics, and the pics of exotic deep sea creatures supposedly "washed up" by the Tsunami (none of them were and none were from anywhere near the Tsunami) were FAR more common than this.
How can people fall for this stuff? gotta go, I need to wire money to my Russian girlfriend so she can pick up her visa.......
Top hoax of all time:
Liberals have compassion for other people.
World's Tallest Woman
Cordially,
Hmmm...I get a lot of spam but the only one of those that I've ever gotten was the one about Bill Gates.
I've been getting a lot of email recently from Kofi Annan. He needs my bank account numbers to help him hide the money he stole from the oli-for-food program.
Actually, oil not oli.
I'll put you on my dad's e-mail list. He forwards all this crap. He's a one man spam machine.
I believe that at least 90 percent of it originates with spammers and hackers. In only a couple of days a forwarded e-mail can have hundreds of addresses attached to it, and all a hacker needs is just one address to dump a payload that'll spread like wildfire before Norton or AVG, etc, gets hold of it and comes out with a patch.
A lot of damage can be done in a day.
I have received the Bill Gates hoax, maybe 8 or 9 times, the Nigera gal a couple of times, that sex change one, and the Katrina Photo of N.O. There are undoubtfully more but I forget them!
Bill Gates is raising money for Katrina and a Nigerian girl.
I get the Nigerian scams on a regular basis and I've gotten the Russian girlfriend scam as well.
Didn't the captured Cody action figure hoax also take place in 2005?
Give me a break. This is a Craig Fergeson monologue.
LOL--yes, those people who fwd all those long, idiotic hoaxes just HATE it when Snopes.com debunks them. One of my nieces used to send me everything like these that she ran across, and she insisted they were all true. I broke her of the habit by always sending her to Snopes. It took awhile, but I no longer get those annoying fwds. I don't know if it's because she's no longer so gullible, or if she just hates my responses. Either way, it works for me.
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