Over the last couple of days, I've noticed the same "amber alert" posted in the status updates of many of my female facebook friends, and even a few of the guys. There are a few variations of it, but the main body is basically the same.
"Little girl, 3 yrs. old picked up by a man driving a gray car, license plate: Quebec 72B 381. Canada. PLEASE RE-BROADCAST ASAP. It could save her. The Kidnapping is recent so do it, 3 seconds will not kill you. If it were your child u would want the same support"
I'm in Ohio, but that's beside the point. A moment of thinking on the part of the reader can highlight a few important flaws in this message.
First of all, if this were your child, or the child of a loved one, would you waste some of your 500 update characters on statements about how recent the kidnapping is, and an admonition to guilt trip others into posting? Would you leave out her name and description? Why type "little girl, 3 yrs old" when you can say "Jane smith, age 3" or "The Kidnapping is recent so do it, 3 seconds will not kill you. If it were your child u would want the same support" when you can offer details of the child's height, weight, hair and eye color, and what she was wearing at the time? A parent or friend searching for a child would give those details to help in the search. How is the general public supposed to identify the child in this message? That's a definite clue that the message is fake.
Second, there's nothing about the car except the color. Even if the witness saw very little, whether the car was big or small, newer or older (rounded or boxy) and probably whether there were two doors or four would have at least been noticed. With a license plate to identify the vehicle, police would have been able to tell the family what make, model, and year it was registered to. An actual Amber alert should have contained that information. Without it, it's tough to look for the vehicle, as license plates are much more difficult to spot than larger details like what kind of car it is. Again, the lack of detail points to a fake message.
Third, recent is not a date, and as readers continue to re-post, "recent" becomes a lie. For instance, this particular alert scam began in February of 2009, not recently, and not as an Amber alert. An early version of it stated that the missing girl was 7 years old, and the vehicle was a newer sliver truck. The "alert" crisscrossed the country over a two day period, and enough people actually contacted police that there were news stories debunking it. More information on this specific hoax can be found at About.com's Urban Legends site, in the story FAKE AMBER ALERT '72B 381' Spreads Far and Wide (and Fast). This is a third example of lack of detail which indicates a hoax.
What makes this such a big deal? After all, it's just one of many hoax tweets and status updates out there. At least this one doesn't give some third party access to your personal information. It's just an immature, but harmless prank, right?
Well, no. It's not harmless, any more than the missing kid email pranks were harmless. Think about it. Now that you know there is one going around, aren't you going to hesitate every time you see a status update, tweet, or text about a missing kid? You'll want to check the facts so that you don't re-post/text/tweet and look gullible to your friends, especially if the only place you're seeing coming from is those friends who re-post/text/tweet everything.
With each new hoax, we become a bit more cynical with respect to anything we see online. It's all ready happened with photos... who believes picture evidence on the internet? Everything remarkable has at least one comment under it in which the commenter stated simply "photoshopped." A lot of people won't even believe photographic evidence in person, and some even disbelieve polaroids, despite the difficulty involved in faking them. It isn't too far fetched to say that the same thing could apply to Amber alerts and other requests put out online. Cry wolf too many times, and folks will start ignoring genuine alerts on the basis that they are all "probably just another hoax."
Still, what can we do? It isn't like you can stop your friends from forwarding hoaxes, and if you don't re-post, you look like the bad guy. There isn't any way to verify an Amber alert, is there?
Well, yes, there is. You can check the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The site has a page for Active Amber Alerts, but you can also search by country, state or province, by how long the child has been missing, and by name once you enter the area and time period.
Another trick for weeding out a hoax is to do a google search on a sizable chunk of the text. I found the story on this one by googling "Little girl, 3 yrs. old picked up by a man." The About.com page on it was at the top of the list. I also googled the format for Canadian license plates, and what I found in the wikipedia entries on that subject led me to conclude that the plates listed in the alert couldn't be Canadian.
My next step was to, instead of re-posting the alert, post a link to the article about it so that my facebook friends could see that there is no alert. That gives those of my friends who have not yet been hit with the post a chance to avoid feeling obligated to pass it on. You can also post that link as a reply or comment to status updates and tweets containing the fake alert. That will help others seeing those updates and tweets to know they don't need to pass it on.
Next time you see a tweet, text, or status update that just doesn't look right to you, remember that you may be onto something. Take a few moments to do a little research before passing it on. It won't save anyone's life, bit it will save you and maybe some of your friends from the embarrassment of having publicly fallen for yet another hoax.
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