Is there any end to hoax charity emails- by Tej Kohli
Thursday, May 1st, 2008Tej Kohli has always been associated with charity works and is helping scores of underprivileged people. Recently what called his attention is the slew of hoax charity emails fooling people on internet.
For years e-mails have been floating around the internet promising money to sick children or for disaster relief fund. Most of these emails assert that if users forward it in their circle, for each email they will contribute a certain some of money. Thus, if they forward email to enough people, some charity organization will make a donation for a good cause.
And while these messages are sham, majority of people continue to send them, clogging inboxes and even worse, casting suspicion on the legitimate online charity campaigns.
Hitherto, there is no such technology on internet to keep track of the forwarded emails. These hoax emails serves no better purpose than causing headache for authentic charities and thereby thinning their chance of raising funds for genuine causes.
Albeit many renowned charities have stepped forward to squash this practice and even have disclaimers on their websites warning users that such email chain letters are fakes, but to no avail.
Despite such efforts this practice is spreading on the internet like forest-fire. Though not all such campaigns are phony, the bad news is, it is casting clouds of suspicion on the legitimate campaigns too. As one fails to distinguish between the fake and genuine campaigns, the confusion persists.
Even online social networks are coming up with several features to thicken this muck further. As a result, people are becoming apprehensive of the online charities and this in turn is limiting the fundraising capacities of many popular charities.
Many hoax-busting websites maintain that this confusion will continue to exist for some time, even in face of efforts to discredit them. One of the reasons is that it’s all too tempting for users to feel like they’ve contributed by doing very little. Such hoaxes give people a chance to experience feeling of doing something good for virtually no effort.