Message circulating via social media claims that Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City is currently housing children missing from the Joplin Tornado and advises tornado victims looking for their kids to contact the hospital.
Email with an old photograph of a leader addressing a crowd claims that a speech on the assimilation of immigrants included in the message was made by Australia's first Prime Minister Sir Edmund Barton in 1907.
Circulating message claims that a series of attached photographs depict a case of South African road rage in which a large elephant pushed a car off the side of a rural road and subsequently flipped it over.
Email purporting to be from delivery company FedEx claims that a package en route to the recipient has been returned due to an addressing error and that he or she must open an attached file to print a mailing label in order to receive the package.
Featured Video
A mobile phone user in a Charlie Chaplin film? Read more.
Tip of The Week
Do you bank online? As a very quick and simple precaution, foster the habit of checking the URL of your bank site when you login. It should start with "https:" rather than just "http:" The "s" on the end means that it is a secure site. Your average phishing scam website is not likely to have the secure "https:" in its URL. So, if you did happen to end up on a phishing scam website, this two second check could alert you that there is something "phishy" going on. Of course, there is a lot more to staying safe and secure online than this, but nevertheless performing this little check is a really good habit to get into.
Circulating email warns that mobile phone numbers in Australia are "going public" next month and claims that consumers will be charged for calls made to them by telemarketing companies.
Message purporting to be from the Institute of Health Sciences in Baltimore claims that lemon is a "miraculous product" that can kill cancer cells, is 10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy, and is "a proven remedy against cancers of all types".
Email claims that attached photographs shown a B737 aircraft just before it crashed after a mid air collision with an Embraer Legacy jet over South America.
Email claims that Internet users can view anyone's Driver's License details by visiting a specified website and entering a name, city and state into a search form.
Get notified via email when a new Digest is published. Enter email address:
Or subscribe to Digest notifications via RSS:
Editorial
Perhaps the most potentially destructive hoaxes are those that make false claims about missing people. Many missing person hoaxes have circulated over the years, at first mainly via email and nowadays via social media as well. Over the last few days, one family has experienced firsthand the detrimental impact of such hoaxes. This family was attempting to raise awareness in the online community of the disappearance of a young relative. However, because of the many missing person hoaxes that have circulated in the past, a number of people initially thought that their plea for help was just another bit of Internet nonsense and dismissed it as such.
Thankfully, in this case, the young missing person was safely located. But, the experience illustrates how missing person hoaxes can curtail the potentially positive outcomes of legitimate missing person alerts. The Internet is a very powerful tool for spreading information about a missing person quickly. So, it's sad to see its power for good lessened by morons who think its funny to create missing person hoaxes.
The lesson for Internet users? Don't dismiss a missing person alert straight away even if you suspect that it might be a hoax. Instead, before you send it on, take the time to find out if the alert is genuine. If it is genuine, by all means send it on. If it turns out to be a hoax, bin in and let the original poster know that the information is not valid.
