Hoax Slayer

Last updated

Hoax Slayer
Type of site
Debunking resource, reference pages
Available inEnglish
OwnerBrett Christensen
Revenue $50,000/year (advertising) [1]
URL www.hoax-slayer.net
LaunchedAugust 2003
Current statusOffline, shut down by owner

Hoax Slayer (stylized as Hoax-Slayer) was a fact-checking website [2] [3] established in 2003 by Brett Christensen, dedicated to critically analyzing the veracity of urban legends. While it was best known for debunking false stories and internet scams, it also hosted a page listing strange but true stories. [4] [5]

Contents

History

Hoax Slayer originated as a Yahoo! group before the website was established. [6]

Stories it has debunked include fake videos claiming to depict Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, [7] myths that the 2013 supermoon appeared bigger than it really did, [8] and a "Simon Ashton" hoax claiming that emails from Simon Ashton should not be opened because doing so would lead to your computer being hacked. [9]

In 2014, the site was reworked, changing the style and color scheme for main pages and new reports, while old reports retained the previous style. Hoax Slayer was closed down on 31 May 2021. [10]

Brett Christensen

Brett M. Christensen, a resident of Bundaberg, Australia, worked as a caravan park cleaner before he founded Hoax-Slayer.com in August 2003. He was inspired to do so after being convinced that the "Budweiser Frogs virus" really existed, only to discover later that it did not. [11] [12] He wrote most of the site's articles, but two of his three sons, according to him, "help maintain the website and do invaluable work behind the scenes." [13] In addition to debunking hoaxes, Christensen has noted that many of them are "loosely derived" from real events. "For example, in Australia in 1999 a woman claimed to have been assaulted by criminals who used a chemical disguised as perfume to disable her. Warnings about that incident, which may not have been true to begin with, soon spread to the internet and have circulated ever since," he told the Guardian. [14]

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">Urban legend</span> Form of modern folklore

Urban legends is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not.

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 that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hoax</span> Widespread deliberate fabrication presented as truth

A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.

Scam baiting is a form of internet vigilantism primarily used towards advance-fee fraud, IRS impersonation scams, technical support scams, pension scams, and consumer financial fraud.

Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Certain versions of the font's copyright string include attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint the font.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet fraud</span> Fraud or deception using the Internet

Internet fraud is a type of cybercrime fraud or deception which makes use of the Internet and could involve hiding of information or providing incorrect information for the purpose of tricking victims out of money, property, and inheritance. Internet fraud is not considered a single, distinctive crime but covers a range of illegal and illicit actions that are committed in cyberspace. It is, however, differentiated from theft since, in this case, the victim voluntarily and knowingly provides the information, money or property to the perpetrator. It is also distinguished by the way it involves temporally and spatially separated offenders.

A spoofed URL involves one website masquerading as another, often leveraging vulnerabilities in web browser technology to facilitate a malicious computer attack. These attacks are particularly effective against computers that lack up-to- security patches. Alternatively, some spoofed URLs are crafted for satirical purposes.

<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.

Koobface is a network worm that attacks Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. This worm originally targeted users of networking websites like Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and email websites such as GMail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail. It also targets other networking websites, such as MySpace, Twitter, and it can infect other devices on the same local network. Technical support scammers also fraudulently claim to their intended victims that they have a Koobface infection on their computer by using fake popups and using built-in Windows programs.

Richard Horton is a retired Police Sergeant with Lancashire Constabulary, and former blogger who lives in Lancashire. He is the author of the Orwell Prize-winning anonymous blog NightJack which commented on his work as a police officer during his time as a Detective Constable.

Zeus is a Trojan horse malware package that runs on versions of Microsoft Windows. It is often used to steal banking information by man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in July 2007 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in March 2009. In June 2009 security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster.com, ABC, Oracle, Play.com, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek. Similarly to Koobface, Zeus has also been used to trick victims of technical support scams into giving the scam artists money through pop-up messages that claim the user has a virus, when in reality they might have no viruses at all. The scammers may use programs such as Command prompt or Event viewer to make the user believe that their computer is infected.

The Microsoft acquisition hoax is a bogus 1994 press release suggesting that the information technology company Microsoft had acquired the Roman Catholic Church. It is considered to be the first Internet hoax to reach a mass audience.

The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets: overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Technical support scam</span> Type of fraud and confidence trick

A technical support scam, or tech support scam, is a type of scam in which a scammer claims to offer a legitimate technical support service. Victims contact scammers in a variety of ways, often through fake pop-ups resembling error messages or via fake "help lines" advertised on websites owned by the scammers. Technical support scammers use social engineering and a variety of confidence tricks to persuade their victim of the presence of problems on their computer or mobile device, such as a malware infection, when there are no issues with the victim's device. The scammer will then persuade the victim to pay to fix the fictitious "problems" that they claim to have found. Payment is made to the scammer through ways which are hard to trace and have fewer consumer protections in place which could allow the victim to claim their money back, usually through gift cards.

<i>Talking Angela</i> Chatterbot app created by Outfit7

Talking Angela is a videogame app, developed by Slovenian studio Outfit7 as part of the Talking Tom & Friends series. It was released on November 13, 2012 and January 2012 for iPhone, iPod and iPad, January 2013 for Android, and January 2014 for Google Play. The app's successor, the My Talking Angela app, was released in December 2014.

Lizard Squad Hacker group

Lizard Squad was a black hat hacking group, mainly known for their claims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks primarily to disrupt gaming-related services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID-19 misinformation</span> False or misleading virus information

False information, including intentional disinformation and conspiracy theories, about the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and the origin, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease has been spread through social media, text messaging, and mass media. False information has been propagated by celebrities, politicians, and other prominent public figures. Many countries have passed laws against "fake news", and thousands of people have been arrested for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. The spread of COVID-19 misinformation by governments has also been significant.

Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines consists of disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic propagated by various sources.

Starting in 2021, a false rumor alleged that certain North American schools were providing litter boxes in bathrooms for students who "identify as cats", or who participate in the furry or otherkin subcultures. Various American conservative and right-wing politicians and media personalities promoted the hoax in response to several school districts enacting protections for transgender students. Many news outlets, fact-checking websites, and academic researchers have debunked such claims, and officials from every school named by those promoting the hoax have verified that the accusations are false. The claims have been described as internet trolling, fearmongering, and anti-transgender rhetoric.

References

  1. Elliott, Tim (26 November 2009). "Aussie hoax slayer smashes web scams". Stuff.co.nz . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  2. Vosoughi, Soroush; Roy, Deb; Aral, Sinan (9 March 2018). "The spread of true and false news online". Science . 359 (6380). Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 1146–1151. doi: 10.1126/science.aap9559 .
  3. Smith, Andrew (9 January 2015). Daley, Beth (ed.). "The persistent internet hoax endures, now on Facebook". The Conversation . The Open University . Retrieved 1 November 2021.
  4. Wenzel, Murray (11 December 2009). "Brett Christensen a 'Hoax Slayer'". NewsMail . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  5. "Travel brands hijacked to dupe customers". Travel Weekly. 25 January 2019. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  6. Malone, Tim (6 August 2010). "Top 10 sites to debunk Internet hoaxes". TechRepublic . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  7. Ngak, Chenda (17 March 2014). "Malaysia Airlines MH370 found in the Bermuda Triangle? Not a chance". CBS News . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  8. Neuman, Scott (21 June 2013). "Supermoon To Dominate Weekend Sky". NPR . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  9. Arthur, Charles (17 March 2010). "Is the virus warning about a hacker called Simon Ashton real?". The Guardian . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  10. Brett M. Christensen (22 May 2021). "Hoax-Slayer is Closing Down". Hoax Slayer. Archived from the original on 22 May 2021. Retrieved 22 May 2021.
  11. Elliott, Tim (26 November 2009). "Hoax slayer puts the bite on vampires of the cyber world". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  12. "No scam too tricky for Bundaberg's Hoax Slayer". The Dalby Herald. 23 June 2016. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  13. About Hoax Slayer
  14. Groskop, Viv (10 June 2008). "Beware of the hoax". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 May 2014.