A sick baby hoax is a confidence trick where a person claims, often on a website, that they have an ill child (or sometimes a pet) and are struggling to pay for their medical expenses. Some versions of the hoax ask people to make a monetary donation directly, while others simply encourage people to share the story.
Professional beggars have been exploiting sick children since ancient times. The success of such scams relies on a particular compassion in people towards children. When a child is sick, this particularly touches people's hearts. [1] An early example of this kind of hoax online is the "sick child chain letter", [1] an email making the claim that "with every name that this [letter] is sent to, the American Cancer Society will donate 3 cents per name to her treatment".
Social media, such as Facebook, facilitate the following form of this scam. A photo of a sick child is posted online, commonly without knowledge of the relatives, accompanied by a heart-touching story and sometimes a request for donations, which are simply collected by the scammer. [2] Often these photos become viral, so it becomes close to impossible to take them down. Since Facebook has been slow to address the problem efficiently (relying on user takedown requests and reports only), several scam- and hoax-combatting websites have worked together to raise the awareness of social media providers regarding this issue. [3] [4]
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.
A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
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 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 pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text. The most famous pastebin is the eponymous pastebin.com. Other sites with the same functionality have appeared, and several open source pastebin scripts are available. Pastebins may allow commenting where readers can post feedback directly on the page. GitHub Gists are a type of pastebin with version control.
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.
Upcoming is a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio.
Windows Essentials is a discontinued suite of Microsoft freeware applications that includes email, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, and parental control software. Essentials programs are designed to integrate well with each other, with Microsoft Windows, and other Microsoft web-based services such as OneDrive and Outlook.com.
The Faith Healers is a 1987 book by conjurer and skeptic James Randi. In this book, Randi documents his exploration of the world of faith healing, exposing the tricks that religious con artists use in their healing shows to fool the audience. Randi's expertise in performing stage magic and mentalism allowed him to easily identify the same techniques when used by con artists. Randi analyzes the methods used by A. A. Allen, Ernest Angley, Willard Fuller, WV Grant, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Ralph DiOrio and others, exposing their tricks. Popoff was dramatically exposed as a fraud by Randi on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Randi expended considerable effort contacting people who were supposedly cured by these faith-healers. He found there was a lot of disappointment and not a single verifiable case of healing. Randi describes the "calling out trick," the "wheelchair trick," the "leg-stretching trick," the "how many fingers trick," the "shotgun technique," as well as methods used to gain personal information about potential victims in the audience. He also describes methods used, often by mail, to convince people to make large donations.
Demonoid is a BitTorrent tracker and website founded in 2003 to facilitate file-sharing related discussion and provide a searchable index of torrent files. The site underwent intermittent periods of extended downtime in its history due to the occasional need to move the server, generally caused by cancellation of ISP service due to local political pressure.
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.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
A real-name system is a system in which users can register an account on a blog, website or bulletin board system using their legal name.
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.
23snaps Ltd.is a free, private social network and photos, videos, measurements and stories of their children to a digital journal and privately share those updates with other family members or close friends. 23snaps is available online and on mobile devices and launched 1 June 2012.
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.
Facebook has been involved in multiple controversies involving censorship of content, removing or omitting information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.
Facebook's Feed, formerly known as the News Feed, is a web feed feature for the social network. The feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. Using a proprietary method, Facebook selects a handful of updates to show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 2,000 updates they can potentially receive. Over two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry. The feature, introduced in 2006, was renamed "Feed" in 2022.
The locksmith scam is a scam involving fake business listings for cheap locksmith services that, once called out, overcharge the customer. The scam targets people who call a locksmith out of desperation, usually because of being locked out of their car or premises. Locksmith scams have been reported in the U.S., the U.K., and New Zealand.
HONR Network is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was founded in 2014 by Lenny Pozner, the father of a six-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in order to "bring awareness to hoaxer activity" and "prosecute those who wittingly and publicly defame, harass and emotionally abuse the victims of high-profile tragedies". Its efforts have led to significant policy changes at Facebook, WordPress, YouTube and other major online platforms to protect victims of harrassment.