JEDDAH, 5 December 2007 — At a big social gathering recently in Jeddah, a woman in her mid- 40s advised other women about the dangers of holding a cell phone against the ear on the right side of their heads. “Dear sisters, please use your left ear while talking on your mobile phones,” she told the women, who all nodded in agreement. “If you use the right ear, it will affect your brain directly. I’m really concerned about your health.”
The information she shared was derived from a fast spreading hoax e-mail. “This is a true fact from Apollo medical team. Please forward this to all of your well wishers,” the message read. This is not the first time and nor will it be the last that hoax e-mails are circulated and taken seriously. In fact there are several Web sites on the Internet devoted to debunking hoax spam messages.
Friends of Mohammed Basyoni contacted him recently by phone as soon as they received an e-mail from him that said: “I’m currently attending a conference in Australia. I was robbed and I lost all my credit cards and cash. I need the money to get back to Saudi Arabia. Please help a friend in need.”
Basyoni, a professor at King Abdulaziz University, said he believes someone had hacked his e-mail and sent the hoax on his behalf to all of his contacts. This type of hack occurs when malicious code somehow makes its way into an e-mail account and forwards itself to everyone on a contacts list. This code can infect e-mail accounts when account holders open an e-mail attachment or click a link inside an e-mail message.
Some hoax creators in Saudi Arabia add a religious twist to the information they fabricate so that it becomes more exciting and tempting to circulate. A message written in Arabic and accompanied by an altered photo of a tree with fruits that resemble human heads was recently circulating.
“Believe it or not, a tree in India produces fruits with human heads,” says the e-mail message. “When I saw the pictures, I remembered the verse ‘Its crop is as it were the heads of devils’ (37:65). Take a look at the attached pictures.”
Another hoax e-mail included a warning about a well-known local clothing store. The e-mail claimed that the owner had installed surveillance cameras in the store’s fitting rooms. Later, the owner published a statement in the local press saying that the message was a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation and unnecessarily raise fear and alarm.
Health-related topics, such as the advice not to place cell phones on right-side ears, are often addressed in these hoaxes, apparently aimed at raising fears among the recipients of the messages.
“Dioxin Carcinogens cause cancer,” reads another e-mail hoax, citing Johns Hopkins as a source. “Especially breast cancer. Don’t freeze plastic water bottles with water in them as this also releases dioxin from the plastic. Please circulate to all you know.”
This hoax (Johns Hopkins has made no such conclusion) was written in both Arabic and English and illustrated with colored pictures. It was distributed via e-mail and through online Arabic forums.
The World Wide Web is full of anonymously authored, unverifiable and randomly forwarded e-mail massages that aren’t a reliable source of information of any type. A simple Google search will often identify any hoax messages. Websites such as snopes.com are great resources for investigating e-mail hoaxes.