"Chain Letters" Internet Tip from Brandywine, Maryland

"Chain Letters" Internet Tip

Chain Letters are email messages that tell you to send a copy to someone else - sometimes it tells you to send it to five or more people. Any message that tells you to copy to someone (anyone) else and then they are supposed to do the same thing and so on, results in a "chain" of messages and thus can be considered a "chain letter" regardless of their additional content. They often do not tell you how or when it will be stopped, so they will go on and on for years. When they are petitions, surveys or class projects to see how many people or places a message can reach, the email address that is given to send it after so many "signatures" is often no longer in existence - often because their email program was jammed with thousands of messages that their system couldn't handle. Warnings about bills that may create bad laws or about a sick or missing child may have at one time been real, but could have been a long time ago and no longer true. Here is a "joke" called "12-Step Program for People Who Send Chain Letters" that illustrates the problem with chain letters (click here for "joke"). Here are some sites that you can search to see if you chain letter is real or not.:

Urban Legends Reference Page from Snopes

Hoax Information in Alphabetical Order

Urban Legends and Folklore from the About network

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