Chain Letters

Chain Letter Evolution
An Old Annoyance Evolves with Technology

Don't Be Fooled by Email Hoaxes

"Cyber snowball fight! Hit someone else and keep the ball going!"
"Friendship circle/ball, spread the friendship, don't break the circle! Don't drop the ball! Pass it on!"
"You've just received a friendship rose! Please pass this rose on and show what a good friend you are! If you get it back x times, it means you have x number of friends!"
"Tag! You've been tagged! Tag your friends with this questionaire so they can play!"
"Please please keep the prayer wheel going! Send this prayer to your friends!"
"Warning! This is the worst virus ever! Don't open any messages with the subject 'Merry Christmas' 'Olympic Torch' 'Good Times' 'Join the Crew'!"
"Please read! Your Msn/Yahoo/AOL/Facebook/Myspace/Bebo etc. Account is about to be deleted and you can save it by forwarding this message!"
"Please don't delete this, forward it on if you have a heart, and save poor little Mariamaia who is suffering from deadly diseases!"

We've all received them, and most of us have passed them on at least once in our lives. They are Chain letters.

Why Chain Letters Are So Bad
How Chain Letters Manipulate the Masses
Hoaxes Are Far From Harmless Fun!
Signs It Is A Chain Letter
How to Research a Forward
Hoax Busting Sites
Inside the Mind of a Hoaxter, the Child That Never Dies and Never Lived
Top Ten Sites for Debunking Urban Myths
Various Reactions to Chain Letters This eye-opening section contains sites where people express their honest feelings about receiving chain letters.

So what are they?
The E-Chain Letter, Just Another Subconscious Mind-Game

Classic Chain Letters promise love, luck, even fame or riches for forwarding, and sometimes the opposite for not passing them on. The threats can range from a period of bad luck to one's own death or the death of someone close to them.

This article is about a chain letter that targeted a 9-year-old child with a death threat for not forwarding it.

Some chain letters are illegal. Any involving money, postal mail, and copying lottery tickets is illegal. Example:
Gloria Query's Illegal Copying Lottery Tickets Chain Letter Scheme

Make Money Fast Chain Letter Exposed

Fraud 101 Spam, Spim, Chain Mail
The Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation

Karen Liddell participated in a snail-mail MMF chain letter, thinking it wouldn't hurt anything, and she has regretted it ever since. She offers her apology and a warning to all not to participate in chain letters.

Who Is Anthony de Croud?

Avoiding Chain Mail

Chain Letters About Sick and Missing Individuals are among the worst type, along with rumors that slander, lie about, misquote or otherwise falsely attribute words and actions to people and entities that didn't say or do them.

Chain letters are not even limited to email. Groups and forums on the web, the blogosphere and social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook are also being misused as a means of passing on chain letters.

Even if you aren't using a computer, you can still get chain letters. The snailmail variety has pretty much fizzled out, however, cell phones and other PDAs are being invaded by text message chain letters that cost money to receive.

Facebook Chain Letters
Myspace Chain Letters

Curt Schilling Will Be Wearing His Red Shirt on Fridays to support the troops. The baseball player makes no apologies for posting a chain letter on his blog.

Memes another word for a certain type of blog chain letter.

Some chain letters can sneak by a lot of people's radar by not looking quite so obviously like chain letters.

These include and are not limited to forwarded Brain Teasers, Jokes, Letters, Lists, Quotes, Points, Trivia and Recipe Chain Letters

Are there any exceptions or are all forwards simply rotten?

There are forwards that started out real and with good intentions, but they are very few compared with the vast majority, and they quickly become old-hat.

Real Articles Getting Turned Into Forwards will often soon be outdated, and/or end up getting unwelcome chain letter promises and threats attached to them as they continue to be passed along. This is why it's always best to check out every and any story or sick/missing person alert on hoax-debunking sites to be sure they are in fact, for real, without having been changed in a way that takes away from what they were meant to be, and their true authors are being credited, and wanting their story forwarded on.

Pleas to send cards, Missing person alerts, prayer requests and other similar appeals to help a sick or endangered person are often bogus, and the truthful ones continue circulating years after the crisis has been resolved one way or another. This is because once a chain letter starts spreading, it just keeps going.

Glurge
Joke Chain Letters
Internet Hoaxes

The exceptions to this characteristic behavior of chain letters is when there is a deadline for the furor of forwarding to stop. Elections and Holidays for example. Whenever there's an upcoming US election, wild political chain letters about the candidates fly around the net. When the election is over, the chain letters concerning it also die down. Easter, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even Valentine's Day chain letters come out of hibernation every year their respective holidays roll around, to deluge inboxes and web forums everywhere. Once the holiday is through, those chain letters return to hibernation, giving many people a much needed break from the unusually high amount of forwards the holiday generated.

Because there are so many mutations of chain letters, especially the meme, and "friendship" "love" and "luck" variety, not all of them are covered on each hoax-busting site.

The reason they mutate is to stay ahead of the hoax radar. That is, someone might be more likely to believe it's true and therefore, pass it on if they can't find a write-up about it on a hoax-busting site.

Sites that Simply Archive Forwards

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