Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Another hoax: Perfume Sniffing Muggers!

Got another alarming email from a relative telling me to WARN EVERYBODY! Seems you get approached by a stranger who asks you what kind of perfume you are wearing, then offers to let you smell a bottle of perfume they are holding -- one whiff and you are knocked out cold, then robbed and who knows what else. Danger danger danger Will Robinson!

Except it's not true. I looked it up on SNOPES.COM, the Urban Legend site, which is remarkably good at helping figure out if a warning is real or a hoax (some *are* real -- not very many, but some).

Here's the link to the perfume scam:

Consider bookmarking Snopes.com so you can check claims like this. Just type in something like "smell perfume" in the search box to get a list of related rumors. They do a remarkable job.

We've got lots to be really scared of; we don't need to scare people over nothing. A relativ used to circulate these kinds of internet hoaxes regularly to his large mailing list, until he got tired of me just taking two minutes out to look them up on Snopes.com and findt that, surprise surprise, 99% were hoaxes. People invent these things and delight in the fact that they make fools of people who circulate them around the internet like wildfire, without bothering to check. If you like making an ass of yourself, go ahead. If not, check.

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