I recently received an email from my mom that had what appeared to be some interesting tips and features available on your cell phone to help you in some “emergency” situations. I decided it was probably a good post but did a quick search to see who to give the original credit for if it existed.
When I got my Google results back the first site listed was Snopes.com. I immediately knew something probably wasn’t correct in the email and checked it out. It turns out the “features” in the email did exist to some degree, but only for certain models and in one case pretty much only overseas.
If you’re not familiar with Snopes, you should really add it to your favorites list and share with friends. Before you decide to forward those e-mails to all your address books, just do a quick search on Snopes of the subject line or some other unique component of the email and see if anything pops up.
I’ve yet to put in a search that didn’t get a result that ended up being a flag to say the email was a hoax or something.
If you’re not aware, forwarding emails like that is a prime harvest option for spammers to collect our email addresses and continue sending you more junk mail to flood your Inbox.
Before you hit SEND, go SEARCH SNOPES!