Email Hoax: Sony Ericsson Laptop

Maybe it's my life experience, maybe I'm a little less gullible than average, I don't know...but I'm still surprised to some degree at how many people, how many people with four-year (or longer) degrees of education, still end up asking us about an email they received promising free this or that or some charity getting donations or some miracle in exchange for forwarding the message to everyone on the Internet or sending some banking information to some random group of syllables in Istanbul.

How can educated people still think they will get something for free? Is this the same mindset that allows casinos in the middle of the desert to air condition rooms the size of football stadiums? Is it perpetual hope fed by feelgood, good guy wins in the end Hollywood fairy tales? Or are people at heart simply naive (which, if you reverse it, is a rather high-priced bottled water...coincidence, of course)?

I recently had a report about people in our institution forwarding messages promising a free Sony-Ericsson laptop if you forward the email to friends, then people started buzzing about it. It took me five seconds to submit a query to Google for an answer: "cc anna for a sony laptop". It actually took longer to pull up the result from Snopes, the best resource we've ever found for urban legends and hoaxes, than to find the list of answers from Google.

A few people have learned to look before leaping with these hoaxes. Usually they learn it because they are sensitive to looking foolish after doing something the first time around that they shouldn't have...other times, it seems as if people just don't give any thought to these issues. I sometimes wonder if these are the people that run out of gas because they just don't think to fill the tank or never have the oil changed in their car or turn up the radio when it makes weird noises instead of taking it to a mechanic.

I have normally written the behavior off as typical behavior for users but I wonder if it isn't something that is encouraged by our consumer behavior. We as a society push to consumers that they can get wonderful dreams for free; you deserve them! Take shortcuts! Busy watching TV and mis-prioritizing your life? Get a degree sitting on your duff for low low cost, because we understand you're busy! Buy this and that and your life will be simpler and boring, crappy tasks will take moments to finish so you can get back to the latest TV fad!

We have people profiting from that idea who really shouldn't be, in my opinion; the state lotto system (for a few bucks you have a one in three million shot at being set for life!) advertises something for nothing, casinos showcase people who have checks for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars lining the walls and once in awhile they may even have a millionaire walk out; they don't mention how much money was spent in the process. How can we not think that email promising millions for a few minutes of time or a free vacation for something as simple as a few forwarded messages may be legit? What have we to lose in trying?

Most people are too naive or ignorant to think about what they're really giving away...

• Storage space on servers forwarding this crap.
• Time wasted having to read them, forward them...especially from prolific forwarders.
• Bank information? That one little click may give some anonymous Russian access to your bank records or credit information.
• Email address? Welcome to another spam list. And maybe your friends can thank you too for adding them at the same time.

This particular hoax is listed as floating around in one form or another since 1997. That's 12 years ago. Twelve years and it's still making rounds...make a slight edit, and suddenly it's fresh and new and fooling even more users.

I said that the people I've encountered who actually stop and check such claims on Snopes or Google before spreading the word are usually people who felt foolish, felt some kind of ramification for a previous mistake. People who don't feel foolish the first...or second...or thirteenth time they fall for such things generally don't feel any accountability for their actions. Unless people are held accountable for their actions they generally don't take action to correct their behavior; because of this little rule of thumb I've noticed over the years I'm afraid there's not much that will be done to prevent hoaxers, scammers and spammers from successfully making fools of our friends and family anytime soon.

Anyone think there's any hope out there? Unless people feel accountable for their actions and thus educate themselves to keep from forwarding such crap...thus make it unprofitable for the scum originating the messages...or computers finally gain human-level comprehension of messages so your system can evaluate what messages are legitimate before delivering them (probably the best route since it keeps people from having to be responsible for thinking about what they're doing and I've noticed that the more an invention offloads our need to think the more popular the invention is), I don't foresee much hope in stopping these messages. Feel free to post your opinions...