Jim Allyn's First Law of Forwards

Today I received a forwarded email about the
“Olympic Torch” virus. Since it seems that nearly
everything I have forwarded to me is false, I
assumed this was too, and knowing that there are
several sites on the internet that research and
expose internet hoaxes, I Googled it. At the top
of the search results list were hoax warnings from
breakthechain.org, urbanlegends.about.com, and
hoax-slayer.com. There is no “Olympic Torch”
virus. It's a hoax.

A few days ago, I received one about a missing
girl, Penny Brown. So I did a Google search for
“Penny Brown”, and at the top of the search
results were hoax warnings from
urbanlegends.about.com, snopes.com,
breakthechain.org, and hoaxbusters.ciac.org.
There is no missing girl named Penny Brown. This
particular hoax has been circulating on the web
since September of 2001, almost 5 years now, yet
people continue to pass it on. When I told the
woman I received this message from that it was a
hoax and that she should check out things like
that before passing them on, she responded, “Who
is it harming?”

Who is it harming? Well, there have been several
different versions of that hoax circulated, and
some of them included a phone number or email
address to contact if you had information. And
these poor people were flooded with calls and
emails asking about Penny Brown. How would you
like to receive 200 phone calls or emails a day
about a missing girl who you don't know, who
doesn't even exist? I know I wouldn't care for
it.

The version of this hoax that I received said
Penny Brown was the daughter of the manager of the
WalMart store in Longs, South Carolina. Other
versions say she's the daughter of the manager of
Long's Drug Store in Southern California, or the
manager of a Metro-Richelieu grocery store. I'd
bet those stores didn't appreciate getting
hundreds of calls about a missing girl that
doesn't exist, either.

But there's more to the answer to “Who is it
harming?” than I realized. Besides the people who
wind up being annoyed with hundreds of calls and
emails, it harms real missing kids. Once you've
received enough of these messages, and you've
figured out that they are hoaxes, what do you do
when you receive a genuine report of a missing
person? That's right, you delete the email and
ignore it. It's the “boy who cried wolf”
syndrome. And the groups who actually help locate
missing children, like CodeAmber and
TeamAmberAlert, spend time looking for children
who don't exist. Several of these organizations
have posted warnings about the Penny Brown hoax and
others like it, and are asking people not to pass
these things on.

Please, if you receive anything of this nature,
check it out before you pass it on. If you find
that it's a hoax, let the person you received it
from know and ask them to to tell everyone they
sent it to not to pass it on.

Here's some of the sites that have the straight
scoop on internet hoaxes:

Snopes

Break the Chain

Urban Legends

Hoax Busters

Now, you're probably wondering, what the heck is
“Jim Allyn's First Law of Forwards”? Here it is:

“The likelihood of an email forward containing any
truth is inversely proportional to the number of > characters preceding each line.”