friends, please be careful and wise when your friends forward emails saying that you can earn money just by forwarding emails.
In the past week, I received the email about Microsoft’s giving away money 3 times…3 times. And I’ve received the same email a long long time ago.
But never have I heard from any friend saying they really get the money.
So I’d like to share some advises about identifying email hoaxes (fake).
First, you can check via search engine…for example, I searched "Microsoft gives money emailing"
Then the search result jumps out right away about several links saying it’s a hoax.
Then I searched again with these words "Microsoft Hoax"
and search engine shows me a link from Microsoft teaching you how to identify hoaxes and phishing scams:
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/phishing/hoaxes.mspx
The first one is a really helpful lesson teaching you not to be tricked! You could lose your personal identity by responding!!
Ok…then the second one shows a link at the end "Urban Legend References Pages" which leads to Snope.com
(What’s "Urban Legends" ? Google it and you’ll know)
Then click on "25 Hottest Legends" and you’ll see about "Bill Gates / Microsoft / AOL Giveaways" listed as the no.25
If you have time, you can look up other popular legends and you might find some of those familiar…
(I can trust this site since it is linked through Microsoft’s official site.)
So next time when you receive a weird email, you can also go to this site and search for it.
But I guess what we receive wouldn’t be too new so you can simply find out through your search engine…