Why not to forward to friends

We’ve all received that e-mail, right? The one that urges us to “forward this to 20 people” in return for anything from “a laptop from Dell” to “a miracle in 7 days” to an outright “surprise right after you click ‘Send’”. Who hasn’t seen the one that says Bill Gates will send you a check for $1 for every single person you forward the message to?

I just received one such e-mail the other day, and couldn’t help but shake my head at the gullibility and outright folly of the universe. The e-mail appeared to have traversed a good portion of the Internet, for it appeared to have been forwarded many a time. Scrolling through the multitude of e-mail headers (To, From, CC, etc.), revealing the e-mail’s traversal path, to the bottom of the message, brought me upon:

 

The scheme here should be fairly obvious: you send this to 8 people, cc’ing Ms. “Anna Swelung” at “Ericsson.com”. Depending on how gullible your 8 friends are (let’s say that an arbitrary 50% of them are in fact gullible and forward the message to 8 of their own friends), Ms. Swelung now has your e-mail address, plus the 8 e-mail addresses you forwarded to her (via cc), plus the 8 e-mail addresses that 4 of your recipients sent to her… (and this doesn’t even count the e-mail addresses of the folks upstream to you; i.e., the folks that sent you the message in the first place).

 Now, let’s say you and your friends are really, really gullible, and decide to up the ante by forwarding the e-mail to not 8, but 20 of your buddies… Think about how quickly (read: exponential growth) Ms. Swelung’s e-mail box will fill-up with the e-mail addresses of folks thirsty for a free laptop computer… Ah, thousands, if not millions of e-mail addresses, harvested, and ready to be spammed with Viagra, Cialis, and HornyAsianVixens.com come-ons.

And now what? The email above is slightly revised version of a 7-year-old hoax promising free phones to frequent forwarders. Though the phrase "computer laptops" has been inserted to reel in more and more people, the anonymous prankster who revised the message didn't even bother to change the names of the "free" items.

Also, the Ericsson T18 and R320 were mobile phones (not laptops) which are now no longer in production.

The email address to which copies of the forwarded message are supposed to be sent, anna.swelung@ericsson.com, is a corruption of the one specified in the original hoax (anna.swelund@ericsson.com), which, of course, was never valid in the first place.

It is important to note that often when you forward email , you leave all the information about the "send/mail to" email addresses of every recipient past and presently in the email "chain" - readable & vulnerable in the headers of the message. And the email address of everyone who has received or been sent the message, can be copied, saved and sold to email marketers, and a ready made listing can be sent  new chain scams  and hoaxes.

Think before you forward. That’s all I have to say.