How to Check out a Hoax

Hoaxes have been around for hundreds of years, and with the explosion of the Internet, there has been a huge increase in hoaxes. Some hoaxes are actually viruses that infect your computer if you click on a link or open an attachment. Some links or attachments allow the sender to monitor your computer and get your passwords to various accounts, including your banking or credit card information.

Others are sent by people wishing to spread lies about other people, sometimes politicians in an opposing political party to the sender. Some hoaxes want to separate you from some of your hard-earned money, and some are just relatively harmless pranks generated by people with too much time on their hands. There are ways to check out hoaxes. Some ideas for this are below.

Steps

1. Use your own common sense. Do you really think you had an unknown relative who died in a foreign country leaving a vast fortune to you?
2. Check the wording in the letter or email. You will often find oddly phrased and disjointed English, usually indicating that the letter is from someone whose first language is not English.
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   Highlight the subject line of a suspected hoax email, then copy and paste it into your favorite search engine. Chances are that other people have received the same email and they are talking about it somewhere online. There are even forums online for people to list any scam or hoax email they received.
4. Do not click on a link embedded in an email purporting to be from a credit card holder or financial institution no matter how authentic it looks. Instead, type the address that you normally use to communicate with the company in your web browser yourself and check for problems.
   • You can try to left click on the link and see if the address where you're actually being sent will appear, but the scammers have mostly disabled that feature because so many people were getting the message to check the authenticity of an address in that way.
5. Use one of the websites devoted to checking out hoaxes. You can find them by typing "exposing a hoax" in your favorite search engine.
6.  Do not give out any personal information over the telephone. If the person claims to be from your bank or credit card company, ask for a name and explain that you will look up the phone number and call back. Do not use a phone number supplied by the caller. Look it up yourself or call information for the number.
   • If the person hangs up, you should report the call to the company they claimed to represent. Most, if not all, of these companies keep records on these scams.
7. Throw away any letter that requests money from you in return for a big payoff down the road. Also toss any that want you to deal with money orders, either sending or receiving. If you receive these letters in an email, delegate it to the "Spam" folder.
   
   source : www.wikihow.com