Al, and WC list members,
I once got a similar charity appeal email some years ago which pointed to a
web site. The web site (and the "victim") were from an "Iron Curtain"
country, and named an American hospital and doctor. It looked so legit
that I decided I could not merely stand by, it was a time for action. I
determined to set up a genuine and legal charitable foundation to help this
poor young person. I contacted the hospital who confirmed that the person
was a former patient. They contacted the named doctor who said (in
effect) that the patient's disease was incurable, that no further treatment
was planned (or rather that "case management" was taking place, they never
say, "It's hopeless, the kid's gonna die soon," that wouldn't be
politically correct) and that therefore any publicity about collecting
money was strictly a hoax. (The web site did say that they were expecting
to finance further treatment from this institution and doctor through
donations made.) No response to my email requests for more information and
my offer to set up a foudation in the USA was ever received from the web
site operators or anyone in that country.
Sometimes a well constructed scam can sound legitimate (in my case it
wasn't a "chain letter", it was a "visit out web site" request). Chain
letters are illegal in the USA, and many if not most jurisdictions. As far
as I know, no one has ever "pledged" a few pennies per mail/email (and
frankly you could almost make more from having everyone send mail and
resell the stamps to stamp dealers anyway) no matter the cause (in the US
that would be promoting a crime of "postal fraud" or abuse or whatever the
legislation calls it, so you couldn't do it legally). "Wire fraud" laws
(often used to prosecute illegal horse race betting operations) could
probably be applied to significant abusers via email.
Merely spawning this discussion is probably a huge waste of most folks
time, too, for that matter. But I wanted to tell you that no matter how
legitimate they may sound, it is always, in my experience, proven to be
some form of hoax or scam if not a mere "email virus".
-- Stafford "Doc" Williamson
President
WinfoTech Corp.
creators of MAQUE -- streaming video service for the internet
http://maque.net
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Koen van Hees wrote:
>
> i'm not sure this kind of message is allowed: reprimand me if this is
> against the rules, but it looks genuine, and i cannot imagine any sort of
> malice concerning this mail
> > >This message is in Portugues but I am going to sumarize it to you,
> > >so that you can think about doing something in favor of it.
> > >This message is a request of a little girl who has cancer.
I would be the first to try and help out as much as possible however
there have been too many hoaxes along these lines and it is difficult to
verify the authenticity of the request. I STRONGLY discourage such
postings to this list. I would however be interested in any thoughts
anyone may have on how one may set up a valid channel for such requests
on the Internet or if such a channel already exists. If one did exist
then I think it would be better to spread the word of its existence than
to spread individual requests which may or may not be valid.
Al Silverberg
Moderator web-consultants
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