Email hoaxes

In the early days of email, the majority of personal emails that I received were forwards containing funny jokes, chain letters, and spam. These days, I don’t receive many hoaxes, but after reading this article on the top 25 Web hoaxes, I had a flashback on some that I have received over my email lifetime. Below are my favs:

• Forward this email and Bill Gates will give you money - example.
• Help a wealthy foreigner in Nigeria to transfer money - example.
• Your Hotmail account will close if you do not forward this to X amount of people - example.
  

The most common email hoax that you will find is a phishing attack, which is an email fraudulently claiming to be from a financial institution instructing you to click on a link for some reason (i.e. Keep your account open). The emails are well-crafted since they contain the official company header and email address. The email body contains a link to a URL from the financial institution, but if you hover over the link, you will notice that it is actually a URL to the spammer/hackers site. Most often curiosity takes over and people click those links, although I have never met anyone who admits to doing it until they call me to help them remove a virus from their computer ;-)