Chain letter

Last updated

A chain letter is a message that attempts to convince the recipient to make a number of copies and pass them on to a certain number of recipients. The "chain" is an exponentially growing pyramid (a tree graph) that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Contents

Common methods used in chain letters include emotionally manipulative stories, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and the exploitation of superstition to threaten the recipient. Originally, chain letters were letters sent by mail; today, chain letters are often sent electronically via email, social network sites, and text messages.

Types

There are two main types of chain letter:

  1. Hoaxes: hoaxes attempt to trick or defraud users. A hoax could be malicious, instructing users to delete a file necessary to the operating system by claiming it is a virus. It could also be a scam that convinces users to spread the letter to other people for a specific reason, or send money or personal information. Phishing attacks could fall into this.
  2. Urban legends: urban legends are designed to be redistributed and usually warn users of a threat or claim to be notifying them of important or urgent information. Another common form are the emails that promise users monetary rewards for forwarding the message or suggest that they are signing something that will be submitted to a particular group. Urban legends usually have no negative effect aside from wasted time.

In the United States, chain letters that request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants (such as the infamous Make Money Fast scheme) are illegal. [1]

Some colleges and military bases have passed regulations stating that in the private mail of college students and military personnel, respectively, chain letters are not authorized and will be thrown out. However, it is often difficult to distinguish chain letters from genuine correspondence.

Channels

Print

Printed Australian chain letter from 2006, with a five-cent coin taped to it as what it calls a "financial eye-catcher" Chain Letter.jpg
Printed Australian chain letter from 2006, with a five-cent coin taped to it as what it calls a "financial eye-catcher"

The oldest known channel for chain letters is written, or printed, on letters on paper. These might be exchanged hand-to-hand or distributed through the mail. One notorious early example was the "Prosperity Club" or "Send-a-Dime" letter. This letter started in Denver, Colorado in 1935, based on an earlier luck letter. It soon swamped the Denver post office with hundreds of thousands of letters before spilling into St. Louis and other cities. [2] In 1964, the head of the United States Postal Inspection Service ordered a nationwide crackdown on violators of postal fraud and lottery laws due to an increase of chain letters reported around college towns in the United States. [3] The typical letters included a list of names and instructed the recipient to send money to the name at the top of the list, remove that name, add their own name to the bottom of the list, and forward the letters to two more people. [3]

Email

Some email messages sent as chain letters may seem fairly harmless; for example, a school student wishing to see how many people can receive their email for a science project, but they can grow exponentially and be hard to stop. Infamously, the salacious Claire Swire email spread in a chain-like fashion when its recipient sought to learn Swire's identity.

Messages sometimes include phony promises from companies or wealthy individuals (such as Bill Gates) promising a monetary reward to everyone who receives the message. [4] They may also be politically motivated, such as "Save the Scouts, forward this to as many friends as possible" [5] or a warning that a popular TV or radio show may be forced off the air. [6] Some, such as the Hawaiian Good Luck Totem, which has spread in thousands of forms, threaten users with bad luck if not forwarded. [7]

Platforms such as Twitter and YouTube can host chain letters playing with users' emotions. They may also be in the form of warnings, such as stories of escaped convicts, which urge the reader to pass the message on. One chain letter distributed on MSN Hotmail began, "Hey it's Tara and John the directors of MSN..." and subsequently claimed readers' accounts would be deleted if they did not pass on the message. [8]

Another common form of email chain letter is the virus hoax and a form of cyberbullying.

Web communities

Chain letters within social media platforms became widespread on Myspace (in the form of Myspace bulletins) and YouTube (in the form of video comments) as well as on Facebook through messages or applications. For instance, the chain post/email of Carmen Winstead, [9] supposedly about a girl from Indiana who was pushed down a sewage drain in a fire drill, states that, "if you do not repost/send this to 10 people, Carmen will find you and kill you." Chain letters are often coupled with intimidating hoaxes or the promise of providing the sender with "secret" information once they have forwarded the message.

See also

Similar distribution

Related Research Articles

The Goodtimes virus, also styled as Good Times virus, was a computer virus hoax that spread during the early years of the Internet's popularity. Warnings about a computer virus named "Good Times" began being passed around among Internet users in 1994. The Goodtimes virus was supposedly transmitted via an email bearing the subject header "Good Times" or "Goodtimes", hence the virus's name, and the warning recommended deleting any such email unread. The virus described in the warnings did not exist, but the warnings themselves were, in effect, virus-like. In 1997 the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective announced that they had been responsible for the perpetration of the "Good Times" virus hoax as an exercise to "prove the gullibility of self-proclaimed 'experts' on the Internet".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Letter (message)</span> Written message from one to another

A letter is a written message conveyed from one person to another through a medium. Something epistolary means that it is a form of letter writing. The term usually excludes written material intended to be read in its original form by large numbers of people, such as newspapers and placards, although even these may include material in the form of an "open letter". The typical form of a letter for many centuries, and the archetypal concept even today, is a sheet of paper that is sent to a correspondent through a postal system. A letter can be formal or informal, depending on its audience and purpose. Besides being a means of communication and a store of information, letter writing has played a role in the reproduction of writing as an art throughout history. Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. Historians Herodotus and Thucydides mention and use letters in their writings.

An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.

A blind carbon copy is a message copy sent to an additional recipient, without the primary recipient being made aware. This concept originally applied to paper correspondence and now also applies to email. "Bcc" can also stand for "blind courtesy copy" as a backronym of the original abbreviation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lottery scam</span> Fraud pretending to be a lottery

A lottery scam is a type of advance-fee fraud which begins with an unexpected email notification, phone call, or mailing explaining that "You have won!" a large sum of money in a lottery. The recipient of the message—the target of the scam—is usually told to keep the notice secret, "due to a mix-up in some of the names and numbers," and to contact a "claims agent." After contacting the agent, the target of the scam will be asked to pay "processing fees" or "transfer charges" so that the winnings can be distributed, but will never receive any lottery payment. Many email lottery scams use the names of legitimate lottery organizations or other legitimate corporations/companies, but this does not mean the legitimate organizations are in any way involved with the scams.

Craig Shergold was a British cancer patient who received an estimated 350 million greeting cards, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Variations of the plea for greeting cards on his behalf in 1989 are still being distributed through the Internet, making the plea one of the most persistent urban legends.

The Claire Swire email of 2000 was a very personal email from Claire Swire to Bradley Chait, who worked at Norton Rose, a law firm in London, England. She described his semen as "yum." He forwarded it to six friends, one of whom in turn forwarded it further with the subject line of "Do you know Claire Swire" until it spread worldwide within days, and received wide coverage in newspapers and television. The author of the original email is in doubt, as Chait later said that the email was a hoax perpetrated by colleagues, as he "was the new boy".

The eCRUSH network consisted of two sites: eCRUSH.com and eSPIN.com. The network was acquired by Hearst Media on December 31, 2006. The original eCRUSH site was opened on February 14, 1999 in Chicago by Clark Benson and Karen DeMars Pillsbury. It pre-dated social networking sites such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook.

Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virus hoax</span> Message warning of a non-existent computer virus

A computer virus hoax is a message warning the recipients of a non-existent computer virus threat. The message is usually a chain e-mail that tells the recipients to forward it to everyone they know, but it can also be in the form of a pop-up window.

Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending a previously delivered email to an email address to one or more different email addresses.

A scam letter is a document, distributed electronically or otherwise, to a recipient misrepresenting the truth with the aim of gaining an advantage in a fraudulent manner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outlook.com</span> Microsoft webmail service

Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft. This includes a webmail interface featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Make Money Fast</span> Electronic chain letter

Make Money Fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".

MCI Mail was one of the first commercial email services in the United States and one of the largest telecommunication services in the world. Operated by MCI Communications Corp. from 1983 to 2003, MCI Mail offered its customers a low cost and effective solution for sending and receiving electronic mail.

Email spammers have developed a variety of ways to deliver email spam throughout the years, such as mass-creating accounts on services such as Hotmail or using another person's network to send email spam. Many techniques to block, filter, or otherwise remove email spam from inboxes have been developed by internet users, system administrators and internet service providers. Due to this, email spammers have developed their own techniques to send email spam, which are listed below.

The jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax involved an e-mail spam in 2002 that advised computer users to delete a file named jdbgmgr.exe because it was a computer virus. jdbgmgr.exe, which had a little teddy bear like icon, was actually a valid Microsoft Windows file, the Debugger Registrar for Java.

A mailbox provider, mail service provider or, somewhat improperly, email service provider is a provider of email hosting. It implements email servers to send, receive, accept, and store email for other organizations or end users, on their behalf.

The Jessica Mydek hoax was a popular chain letter, circulated by hoaxsters, to play on the sympathy of credulous readers, and get them to respond, so as to build a sucker list. The letter was first observed in 1997.

Since around 1979, a chain letter has falsely claimed that a film is in the works in which Jesus will be depicted as gay and involved in a promiscuous swinger lifestyle. Born of half-truths regarding The Many Faces of Jesus, Jens Jørgen Thorsen's abandoned pornographic film about Jesus, the hoax initially implied that the film's would-be producer was a magazine that had run a poll about Thorsen's plans. The narrative has morphed over time to claim that the supposed film is an adaptation of the 1997 play Corpus Christi, which does depict Jesus as gay, although not in a sexualized manner.

References

  1. ↑ Chain Letters. United States Postal Inspection Service. Archived from the original on 8 May 2012. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service cites 18 U.S.C.   § 1302 when it asserts that chain letters are "illegal if they request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants, pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute".
  2. ↑ VanArsdale, Daniel W. (1998). "Chain Letter Evolution". Archived from the original on 28 May 2023. Retrieved 27 May 2023.
  3. 1 2 "Crackdown Ordered on Chain Letters". The Jefferson News. New Orleans, Louisiana. 27 February 1964. p. 5 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. ↑ Mikkelson, Barbara; David Mikkelson. "Thousand Dollar Bill". Urban Legends Reference Pages. Archived from the original on 2020-01-08. Retrieved 2008-03-24.
  5. ↑ Mikkelson, Barbara; David Mikkelson (31 October 2000). "A Boy Scout Outing". Urban Legends Reference Pages. Retrieved 6 August 2008.
  6. ↑ Mikkelson, Barbara; David Mikkelson (15 March 2001). "Petition to Ban Religious Broadcasting". Urban Legends Reference Pages. Archived from the original on 4 July 2021. Retrieved 6 August 2008.
  7. ↑ Newton, Michael (2004). The encyclopedia of high-tech crime and crime-fighting . Archived 2019-06-05 at the Wayback Machine . p. 144.
  8. ↑ "Thousands fall for hotmail prank". BBC News. 8 March 2006. Archived from the original on 8 April 2008. Retrieved 27 May 2008.
  9. ↑ "MySpace Ghost of Murdered Teen". snopes.com. 10 October 2006. Archived from the original on 4 July 2021. Retrieved 22 November 2011.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.