It’s Halloween season as I prepare this article: our yearly custom of trick-or-treating with mostly treats and a few relatively harmless tricks and pranks. However, on the web, it seems that it’s Halloween all year judging by the proliferation of virus hoaxes, urban legends, and downright fraud. This month I’ll try to shed some light on these unsavory subjects and show you were to find out if that dire virus warning is for real or not before you warn all of your friends and family of a non-existent threat.

There are several websites devoted to debunking myths, legends, and fraud:

Snopes is a great place to read up on urban legends. It has a search feature too. One could easily while away many an hour in this site. I like the link to the “Top Searches.” One that I received recently is at the top of the list. The article is about hotel key cards being hacked to steal your identity. That urban legend is sure making the rounds in email but it’s simply not true.

The AFU & Urban Legends Archive is a rather quirky site but has tons of useful information organized into topics like sex and politics. I clicked on Politics and read about “Baghdad Betty,” an Iraqi female broadcaster supposedly telling GI’s that while they’re in Iraq, Bart Simpson is sleeping with their wives. I bet Nancy Cartwright is getting a real kick out of that one.

Vmyths is another great source of information on urban legends as well as virus hoaxes and run-of-the-mill hysteria. It also features articles on spotting virus hoaxes and ways to reduce the number of them. This site is well worth looking into.

Hoaxbusters focuses solely on Internet hoaxes and chain letter schemes. They also write about the history of web hoaxes. Apparently, these hoaxes have been around since 1988 in the days of bulletin boards. The first documented hoax was titled, rather appropriately, “Really Nasty Virus.” It was alleged to attack folks using state-of-the-art 2400-baud modems. Remember those days?


Symantec, the maker of Norton Anti-Virus, has a section of their website devoted to hoaxes. From the main page, you can view a list of hoax links in alphabetical order. Note that there isn’t a search feature to look for a hoax that isn’t on the list. This would be a great site to check first. If the one you’re researching isn’t listed, go to another website.

The National Internet Fraud Watch Information Center is a veritable goldmine of information about all sorts of fraud. Fraud against the elderly, Internet fraud, telemarketing fraud, you name it. They also have an online complaint form to report abuse. There is also comprehensive information about the movement to stop unwanted sales calls including a link to the popular federal opt-out website, www.donotcall.gov. They also have links to information about maintaining privacy and avoiding identity theft.

Last, let’s look at Purportal. This is an easy to use search engine that allows you to search Snopes and About.com’s Urban Legends archives, the CIAC Hoax Database, CERT’s computer security database, and Symantec’s Virus Encyclopedia. Merely enter a few key words into the appropriate field, and, presto, you can find out for sure whether that threat is real or not.

Well, that’s about it for this month. Hopefully, some of the information in this article will be useful as you and I try to avoid being taken in by hoaxes and scams. Now, I need to go out and buy some candy to pass out to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Otherwise, they may just decide to spam my inbox and try to get my social security number from junk mail. Whatever happened to the days when kids just soaped a guy’s car windows?

Jerry Wonderly