My daughter was one who had a message forwarded to her on her cell phone today, about the rumor of a gang initiation at Walmart involving killing three women. I had an email bulletin from the local newpaper warning about the rumor and then on kten news tonight they talked about it saying that it was probably a rumor but they even had a poll asking people if a text message could make them change their plans.
It took one search to come up with past occurrences of this rumor on email, going back as far as 2005 – you can check it on Snopes.com
Evidently the Paris News, Walmart, and Kten, don’t know about google…
I check everything out at Snopes.com It is a good site, especially to refer people who don’t believe you when you tell them that something is indeed a hoax. In my opinion, 99.9% of most forwarded emails are false these days!
I agree. I usually don’t make such a big deal of it but when the newspaper and the local television news channel actually validate it without checking it just floors me!!
That particular rumor seems to have been pretty strong this time around. It came to us via the “Miami Police Dept. who’d called the Miami Dolphins security office . . .” I mocked it but then I’m a cynic with this stuff anyway.
I think the added ability to make it viral by texting could have caused that phenomena. I wonder if we will see more of that. My daughter has also gotten spam texts. Just what the world needs…