Asiaweek.com | Technology | Truth or Consequences

The other day, a friend forwarded to me an e-mail that she had just received from a contact. The subject heading immediately caught my attention. "Will you still wear Tommy Hilfiger clothing?" it read. I didn't have to click open the message to know what it contained. The same digital chain letter has been doing the rounds of servers worldwide for about three years. I have received it from different sources twice in the past. It goes like this -- mind you, not a word of the first paragraph is true:

"I'm sure many of you watched the recent taping of the Oprah Winfrey show where her guest was Tommy Hilfiger. On the show, she asked him if the statements about race he was accused of saying were true. Statements like: 'If I'd known African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish and Asians would buy my clothes, I would not have made them so nice. I wish these people would *NOT* buy my clothes, as they are made for upper-class White people.' His answer to Oprah was a simple 'YES,' after which she immediately asked him to leave her show.

"My suggestion? Let's give him what he's asked for. Let's not buy his clothes! Let's put him in a financial state where he himself will not be able to afford the ridiculous prices he puts on his clothes.

"Please send this message to anyone you know who spends their hard-earned money on clothes made by someone who does not respect them as a person or a people!"

Hilfiger never made any racist remarks. In fact, he never even appeared on the Winfrey program. And what would an Asian-owned company have against Asians? Though few people who wear the designer's trendy clothes know it, Hong Kong businessman Silas Chou runs the Hilfiger company.

Hoaxes on the Internet have become a fact of life in the e-mail age. Usually, messages tout fake offers -- free clothing from The Gap or free beer from Miller. A classic prank e-mail dating back to 1997 purports to be from Bill Gates himself (God is e-mailing me?!?!). It claims that Microsoft wants to test an e-mail tracing program it devised and asks the recipient to forward the letter to 1,000 of his nearest and dearest. Do that and Gates promises to pay $1,000 for the trouble. Another joke message announces Internet Cleanup Day and warns computer users to refrain from connecting to the Internet in any way for the entire period because "each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours to allow us to clean it."

About a month ago, I got a recently authored gag e-mail about a fraudulent free-phone offer from Ericsson. Try sending an e-mail to Anna Swelund, the "executive promotion manager for Ericsson Marketing" named in it, and the Ericsson server responds with a terse message and a link to a page on the company website advising that the chain letter is illegal and "this person does not exist." (Pity, I like to think that somewhere in what I imagine to be Ericsson's austere offices in Scandinavia, there lives a perky Anna who merrily sits at her monitor, opening up every single one of the millions of messages from bargain-hunters around the world piling up in her mailbox.)

Some chain messages started out with honorable intentions, but then got twisted into sheer fiction. Take the Craig Shergold story. Pleas for the British boy with the brain tumor began circulating by fax and word of mouth about 10 years ago. The sick tyke -- he will forever be a child of anywhere between seven and 13 -- wanted to get into The Guinness Book of World Records so his family had issued a call around the world for get-well cards so little Craig could amass a world-beating collection. The challenge spread and the cards poured in. The appeal was so successful that in 1991 Shergold's parents asked that people stop responding.

But there was no ending it. The original wish transformed into a request for business cards, postcards, Christmas cards, and so forth. In some letters, "Craig" became "Greg," while his surname mutated into half a dozen versions -- Sherwood, Suregood, Shelford, StepfordŠ The advent of e-mail gave second wind to the drive. The latest letter in circulation claims that ailing Craig is desperate to build up the biggest stack of business cards from doctors and dentists ever accumulated. I read somewhere recently that the real Craig's card pile topped 250 million -- two years ago. And what of the boyŠerŠyoung man? According to press reports, he had surgery nine years ago and recovered completely.

The Shergold saga did little harm, though it may have clogged the family's mailbox, strained the services of their local post office and got lots of people concerned about a boy who had already gotten well. But hoaxes like the Hilfiger e-mail and others can do real damage. Three years ago, Tommy Hilfiger had to launch his own e-mail blitz to counter the calumny. Yet the falsehood keeps circling the globe.

And rumors don't just spread from computer to computer. In the Philippines on April 1 -- April Fools Day -- many Filipinos were deeply dismayed when they received text messages on their handphones claiming among other things that the Pope had died, President Joseph "Erap" Estrada had been overthrown in a coup, and Estrada's predecessor Fidel Ramos had collapsed while playing golf. The Philippines is the world leader in mobile phone short-messaging or "texting" as Filipinos call it, with an estimated 40 million messages transmitted every day, more than all of Europe's handphone text traffic combined. The e-rumors upset the government, already unhappy about the stinging Erap jokes circulating among avid texters. Officials suggested that the false stories were being spread to destabilize the country. Complained Estrada: "We are using technology to clown around."

Better get used to it, Mr. President. There's no getting away from such dotcom-foolery. The hoaxes will continue as long as idle, imaginative and mischievous people get online. The only recourse for the wired, but not wily: common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism. Don't believe everything you read -- or see (in this age of computer-altered photographs) -- on the Internet. And if you receive an e-mail that implores you to spread the word about something, no matter how exciting the offer or heart-rending the medical predicament, think twice or three times before pressing that "forward" arrow. Check it out first.

If you would like to find out more about Internet hoaxes and e-mail chain letters, take a look at the U.S. Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability site at

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