What hoax emails have you been sent? how do you check to see if it's a hoax?

Question

Did you hear the one about how the Venezuealn president owned Citgo and was going to run the US out with high gas prices? Have any other good ones? BTW: if you run the word hoax and the headline of a suspicious story, it takes you to one of several sites that report fake news stories.

Answer 1

I second the snopes.com recommendation, it's a very helpful site.

And as you said, doing searches can be very hepful. You can put a few words from the email into quotes and run a search on that.

I wouldn't know what they contain anymore as I rarely read them. You can often tell from the subject line that it's a hoax.

Okay, so how do I earn my 10 points here? By pointing you to this amusing story about how someone scammed a scammer:
http://forum.419eater.com/john_boko.htm

Answer 2

One I recently received was that the Koran 9:11 fortells US invasion. I Googled Koran + versus and got the truth to what it really said.

There is a website called break the chain and you can also look up key words on internet.

Answer 3

I have own the Irish lottery 3 times now ! And I never even entered . I never open stuff unless I know the people . Basic rule of thumb , If it sounds to good to be true , It's spam..........

Answer 4

If there are any links, I make sure that I look at the bottom of my e-mail client to see where it is actually taking me, because you cannot fool that. And if the from e-mail adress looks suspicious to me, I delete it.

I've actually been threatened in fraud e-bay e-mails. Sueing and such...

Answer 5

http://www.snopes.com

I can smell a bad e-mail from a mile away so I've submitted some and gotten them put up there myself. :)