It’s better to be safe

We’ve all had them. Well meaning friends and relatives forward messages of how unscrupulous individuals are out to harm us and take our money. And yes there probably are criminals and conmen out to get us.

However they probably won’t be using any method described in a hoax email.

You can’t hope to protect yourself by looking out for every single specific permutation of scam going around. Doing that would leave yourself open to all the other scams that are around. What you must do is take general precautions in your every day life- precautions you can’t hope to learn from a forwarded email.

Hoax emails get around because everyone in the chain just trusted the person before and because some devious individual has attached big names to the warning. Many of them contain one or two grains of truth. The well meaning individuals who send these things on are probably thinking “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” Well yes it is. However the safe option is to hit delete and not send the email. Because the chances of the warning doing anyone any good are remote but the chances a forwarded email will do harm are not.

So if you receive an email warning forwarded to you, check it out against the hoaxbuster sites such as snopes or breakthechain. If these websites seem too confusing, simply be safe rather than sorry and don’t forward email warnings.