Don't help Amy Bruce!

Not a day passes without millions of email boxes being spammed by something similar to this.

Hi, my name is Amy Bruce. I am 7 years old, and I have severe lung cancer ... I also have a large tumor in my brain, from repeated beatings. Doctors say I will die soon if this isn't fixed, and my family can't pay the bills. The Make A Wish Foundation, has agreed to donate 7 cents for every time this message is sent on. For those of you who send this along, I thank you so much, but for those who don't send it, what goes around comes around. Have a Heart, please send this. Please, if you are a kind person, send this on. PLEASE HIT FORWARD BUTTON NOT REPLY BUTTON. YOUR'S FAITHFULLY, AMY BRUCE amy.bruce@makeawish.com (PLEASE HELP ME LIVE LIKE YOU DO)

Who can avoid reaching out to a kid? So, the impulsive response to this tearjerker, for many, is to hit the Forward button and dump this on to hundreds of their friends. Fight that impulse! (By the way, pictures of cute, African-American children work even better on guilt-ridden WASPs.)

Like ALL chain letters - and the overwhelming majority of virus warnings you get, or the requests to boycott various brands (Tommy Hilfiger is one such target, wrongly accused of racist remarks on a TV show) - this is pure unadulterated bullshit!

When you get something like this in future, just trash it! But if you feel worried or have a nagging sensation of guilt that says "it may be genuine", just copy & paste the first few words of the message into Google. In this case, for example, copy and paste

hi, my name is Amy Bruce I am 7 years old, and I have severe lung cancer

(try it NOW, if you are near a computer). You'll be led to a list of relevant sites, any of which will take you to a page with this kind of info:

Amy Bruce Charity Hoax Summary: Email claims that 7-year-old Amy Bruce is dying of lung cancer and a brain tumour and that the Make A Wish Foundation will donate money when the email is forwarded. 

Status: False 

Examples: [In this section several examples of the variants of the hoax are displayed - ZAK] 

Commentary: This absurd chain letter began circulating back in 1999 and is still being passed around. The information presented in the email is a total fabrication. There is no 7-year-old Amy Bruce who is dying of both lung cancer and a brain tumour. Furthermore, the Make A Wish Foundation is not donating money every time the email is forwarded. The Make A Wish Foundation would not support such an email campaign, even if it were true. 

The concept of individual emails being "tracked" as they journey through cyberspace is a common theme among hoax emails. The only way to "track" an email would be to embed some sort of hidden code in the email and it would have to be continually forwarded in HTML format in order to contain the code. The logistics of tracking an email that could ultimately be forwarded thousands of times are clearly problematical at best. In any case, tracking an email in the way described would raise all sorts of privacy issues and it is highly unlikely that any ethical organization would knowingly participate in such a practice.

Hoaxes like these also cause a lot of trouble for the charitable organizations they mention. Make A Wish Foundation had to devote valuable resources to answering queries about their supposed involvement and to set up a web page just to deal with this. I'd suggest reading it for other useful information, too.


So, I reiterate, please delete all such mail without forwarding ... saving precious bandwidth and everyone's time! But if you have time on your hands, or fingers just itching for that Forwarding Fix, or if you feel kinda empty without having done your Forward-of-the-Day, I suggest you send them a link to this blogpost, instead!


(Regardless of whetever you decide to do, please do take my name off your SpamList. Thanks.)