Jim Walker from The Santa Clarita Valley Signal talks about the time he had one of his kidneys stolen (before you become alarmed but not alert, Jim still has both of his kidneys) and the time he almost fell for the rumour that Wall-Mart was releasing Chanukah Hams just in time for the holiday season! [1]

A very fun read!

• Jim Walker: Sticking forks in urban turkeys

Footnotes:

1.	For those in need of extra guidance, Chanukah (variously spelled “Hannuka”, “Chanuka” and “Channukah”, is a holy Jewish holiday, and of course observant Jews would never eat ham.
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Obviously nothing says you’ve had a great time on a business trip more than coming home missing an organ. You and all the other guys in the office can compare scars where your kidneys used to be and reminisce about “Good old Ralph”, who was stupid enough to let it happen to him twice.

And yet, as much fun as that situation sounds like, grim stories of commercial organ harvesting are turning out to be very real, although perhaps a little less sensationally dramatic than the popular urban legend version above.

News site Bloomberg recently ran a piece about organ gangs preying on people living in poverty, offering them cash in return for harvesting a healthy kidney.

Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

This particular piece focused on a black market ring that was selling the harvested organs to Israeli patients desperately in need of kidney transplants, but other news items have also surfaced telling similar stories from other parts of the world.

The interesting folklore question [1] about this is: doesn’t the existence of a global black market in illegally harvested and transplanted organs make this Urban Legend true? I mean, doesn’t it?

The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is ‘Not really.’

…Okay, I can tell you’re a little disappointed, but let me explain.

To understand why this doesn’t exactly verify the Urban Legend, we need to consider that despite their similarities, these two stories are still quite different.

The Urban Legend version — a traveling businessman meets a pretty woman in a bar who seems instantly, probably even unexpectedly, attracted to him — is as much a morality story as anything else. In some versions of the story the businessman is married, and the consequences of his infidelity, and for being foolish enough to allow his personal safety to be compromised by the promise of a night with a pretty stranger, are predictably awful. It’s kind of like someone taking the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” thing to a whole new and disturbing level of literal interpretation.

The real-life stories are more conventional and mundane and, let’s face it, all the more sad and terrible because of it. The simple reality is that there are people in the world who are willing to sell a kidney due to poverty. And wait, there’s also the complexity of the organ transplant process to consider. The idea that people are randomly harvesting some stranger’s kidney in a hotel room on the premise that it might be used in a transplant within a very small timeframe is almost as unrealistic as when Kim Kardashian promises to stay married for longer than a week. For a transplant to be successful, matching between donor and recipient must be done before the operation can have any chance of success.

So, ya, I personally don’t consider the classic Urban Legend story to have been substantiated by these stories of black market organ harvesting rings. The randomness of the way in which people are targetted for harvesting is so much a part of the morality warning [2] of the Urban Legend version that the fact that it’s missing from the news stories means the Urban Legend stays ‘False’ for now.

Further Reading

• Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis
• The Kidney Thieves
• Kidney Theft
• Requirements of a Kidney Donor

Footnotes:

1.	I promise, this really is interesting stuff to people who study contemporary folklore.
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2.	In other words, the “Dude, it could happen to you!” part of the story.
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Don’t stop for any reason. Whatever you do… DON’T STOP FOR ANY REASON!!

That’s the frantic advice being given by a chain email that made its way into my inbox today [1].

Your life depends on it.

You are not safe.

If you pull your car over, if you stop, you are going to become a victim of a gang robbery, rape or perhaps even murder.

∗∗∗

Email warnings about gang tactics and initiation rituals are nothing new. Not only have they been floating around the internet for a number of years, there is every likelihood they were shared via photocopiers and fax machines before email became the de facto way of forwarding alarming advice.

Over the years, we have been warned that gang members have begun to hide in the back seats of cars when motorists stop to fill up with gas, only to attack and murder the driver once he or she has arrived home.

We have been told to never flash our car lights back at someone who puts theirs onto high beam because a gang initiation ritual requires gang members to drive around at night flashing their headlights, and to pursue and murder the first motorist who flashes their lights back.

And we’ve been told about various gang initiation crimes centred on car parks and shopping malls, in which women and children are to be abducted and murdered by new members to a gang.

Now we have an email that claims that gangs have developed two new techniques:

• Leaving a baby / infant car seat by the side of the road to force concerned motorists to pull over to investigate
• Throwing eggs at windshields with the knowledge that if the motorist attempts to clean the egg off with their wipers he or she will make the situation worse and will be forced to pull over anyway

∗∗∗

Collected via email on 13 January 2011:

Subject: FW: Police warning when driving.!!

While driving on a rural end of the roadway on Thursday morning, I saw an infant car seat on the side of the road with a blanket draped over it.

For whatever reason, I did not stop, even though I had all kinds of thoughts running through my head. But when I got to my destination, I called the Police and they were going to check it out. But, this is what the Police advised even before they went out there to check….

"There are several things to be aware of … gangs and thieves are now
plotting different ways to get a person (mostly women) to stop their
vehicle and get out of the car.

"There is a gang initiation reported by the local Police where gangs are
placing a car seat by the road…with a fake baby in it…waiting for a woman, of course, to stop and check on the abandoned baby.

"Note that the location of this car seat is usually beside a wooded or grassy (field) area and the person — woman — will be dragged into the woods, beaten and raped, and usually left for dead. If it’s a man,
they’re usually beaten and robbed and maybe left for dead, too.

DO NOT STOP FOR ANY REASON!!!

DIAL 0-0-0 AND REPORT WHAT YOU SAW, BUT DON’T EVEN SLOW DOWN.

"IF YOU ARE DRIVING AT NIGHT AND EGGS ARE THROWN AT YOUR WINDSCREEN, DO NOT STOP TO CHECK THE CAR, DO NOT OPERATE THE WIPER AND DO NOT SPRAY ANY WATER BECAUSE EGGS MIXED
WITH WATER BECOME MILKY AND BLOCK YOUR VISION UP TO 92.5%, AND YOU ARE THEN FORCED TO STOP BESIDE THE ROAD AND BECOME A VICTIM OF THESE CRIMINALS.

THIS IS A NEW TECHNIQUE USED BY GANGS, SO PLEASE INFORM YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.

THESE ARE DESPERATE TIMES AND THESE ARE UNSAVOURY INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL TAKE DESPERATE MEASURES TO GET WHAT THEY WANT."

Please talk to your loved ones about this. This is a new tactic used. Please be safe.

Get started NOW — SEND THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES TO BE CAREFUL AND AWARE OF EVERYTHING AROUND THEM SO AS NOT TO BECOME A VICTIM.

∗∗∗

Thankfully, you only need to spend a couple of minutes on Google to turn up results that clearly indicate that this email is a hoax.

The DesMoines Register, for example, spoke to the DesMoines Police Department who confirmed that the email is a hoax.

The Tennessee Department Of Corrections issued a statement indicating that an employee had privately forwarded the email, but there was no evidence to consider it as true.

And of course the excellent reference sites of snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com have both tagged the email as false.

∗∗∗

So, please be assured that there really is no widespread global [2] gang initiation ritual taking place in which infant car seats and eggs are being used to waylay motorists.

Footnotes:

1.	Thanks to Darren K
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2.	In case you’re interested, the example of the email that I have used above has been modified for an Australian audience – according to this list on Wikipedia, Australia is the only country that uses “000” as its emergency number.
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“ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN,” the first picture reads, but the second is quick to disagree: “ONLY HUMANS GO TO HEAVEN READ THE BIBLE”.

So begins what appears to be a rather quirky theological debate about the souls of dogs (and eventually of rocks!), carried out entirely on church signs.

But, we ask ourselves, is it real? Did the religious communities represented by Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church really go to war with each other over whether or not pets can go to paradise?

As it happens, the answer is no, they didn’t…

It was a funny email, one that made me laugh out loud when it bounced into my email inbox a couple of weeks ago. The text went something like this:

At first glance it seemed like a charming and harmless little disagreement, the type of which you might have encountered on an episode of The Vicar Of Dibley.

The photos themselves seem realistic enough — there’s little doubt that we’re looking at pictures of real church signs. But if the signs themselves look real, it turns out that the words on them aren’t.

The detail that made me suspicious at first was the fact that the pictures of each sign appear to have been taken from exactly the same position in all of the frames.

In an of itself, this detail alone would be hard to pull off without some very careful setting up. Even a slight difference between a picture of one sign and the next picture of that sign would potentially stand out.

Not only that, but the pictures also appear to have been taken at the exact same time of day with, in the case of Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church, the exact same cars in the background, on the left, in every picture!

So, we can be reasonably certain, just on these details alone, that the images have been faked. It’s much more likely that the same images are being used for each message. However, to make absolutely certain, we head to the intertubes!

One quick Google search later and the top result returned is a site called “Church Sign Generator“. [1]

As it happens, this is a novelty web site that allows visitors to create their own messages on a variety of ‘stock image’ church signs — including images of the signs outside Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Normally the Church Sign Generator web site stamps the images it creates with its web address, but whoever was responsible for the “All Dogs Go To Heaven” strip also covered his or her tracks by removing this clue.

Conclusion

Pretty much an open-and-shut case. Someone discovered the Church Sign Generator web site, created an amusing disagreement between two churches on the matter of dogs and rocks and whether or not they can get into heaven, and an Internet Meme was born!

It’s worth mentioning that we could have attacked this particular project from at least one other direction. If we had been able to establish that Our Lady of Martyrs and Beulah Cumberland Presbyterian Church don’t belong to the same community, then the likelihood of a public disagreement of this nature — where claims are being made back and forth — would probably be very slim.

And there you have it! Personally, I don’t know if dogs do go to heaven or not, but I do believe one thing I’ve seen printed on a (fake) church sign:

Footnotes:

1.	You can view a PDF screengrab here, in case the site itself is ever taken offline.
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Barry Williams, Supreme Universal Skeptic Of The 12th Magisterial Order [1], has sent in another interesting variant of the infamous Nigerian Scam.

As Barry mentions in his email:

Murray

I despair for the continuing deterioration of literacy among barristers admitted to the bar in the UK.

Barry

I can understand Barry’s emotional distress, since the email asks you to believe that it has been sent by a barrister located in the UK, while simultaneously being pockmarked with a truly impressive variety of misspellings and grammatical errors.

Aside from the UK barrister detail, this variant is pretty standard for a Nigerian Scam:

• Someone has passed away who had access to buckets of money
• The person who now has access to the money needs a co-conspirator to get the money out of the country
• The reward for being of help is generous beyond all expectation (35% of $9.5 million is $3.3 million and some small change — not a bad return if the money ever existed)
• You need to supply your contact details so further details can be sent

Of course, what really happens if you send your details is a complex confidence game in which you are constantly promised that you are about to receive a very large sum of money but not before some ‘unexpected fees’ are paid, to which you will be asked to contribute. Once these ‘fees’ are paid, more ‘fees’ will arise, and still more, until you are unwilling or, in many cases, unable to provide any more money into the scam.

Footnotes:

1.	And owner-operator of the Barry Williams Blog.
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So, oh yes, imagine my excitement when I discovered two new variants in my inbox this morning! [1]

Both are courtesy of Barry Williams, Lord Imperial Ruler Of The Australian Skeptics [2] and writer of the excellently skeptical Barry Williams Blog.

As Barry points out in his original email about the “bussness magnet” specimen:

While the full email is typically riddled with translation errors, there really is something charming about the idea of a “business magnet”, as opposed to a “business magnate”, which is the idea I suspect the writer was attempting to convey.

I love the image of a business person trying to walk down the street, struggling along because bank managers and real estate developers and investment brokers are stuck all over him or her due to the horrible effects of business magnetism! Arrggh! NoooOOoo!

The rest of the email is pretty much what you’d expect from a Nigerian Scam — sudden death, buckets of money, a need for someone ‘abroad’ [3] to help with various transactions, please send your details and so on.

And now for the complete email itself:

What a brilliant variant! Many thanks to Barry for sending it through. I’ll post his other specimen a little later in the week.

Until then, much warmth!

Murray By Moonlight

Footnotes:

1.	I didn’t actually jump up and down and clap my hands, if that’s what you’re imagining, but I definitely did smile and also possibly did rub my hands together and say, “Aha! The game’s afoot!”, or something equally silly.
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2.	I think his official title is “Executive Officer”, but I like my version better.
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3.	That’s you, in case you’re not paying attention.
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What a fascinating variant! By now, I assume most people are aware of the 419 / Nigerian Scam [1], and yet years after alerts about this scam began appearing on the Internet, it’s still being run in many different forms around the world, and new victims fall prey to it every year.

This particular variant is interesting because of the way in which it begins:

This is to thank you for your effort.I understand that your hands were tied.Not to worry. I have succeeded,the money has been transfered into the account provided by a newly found friend of mine in Paraguay To compensate for your past assistance and commitments,i have dropped an International Certifie Bank Draft of $1.8million for you.

Yes, yes, yes! Aside from all of the misery this little bastard scam might have caused, I love the way this variant starts out by implying that a relationship already exists between the sender and recipient. Even the second sentence attempts to cement this idea — you couldn’t help [2] because your hands were tied. You obviously wanted to help, you just couldn’t!

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would fall for such an obvious ploy, but I guess it’s possible that someone might think they had received the email in error and might also believe they have a chance to cash in on a healthy dose of misplaced generosity.

Of course, this email is as much a scam as the many other variants floating around on the Internet.

Don’t forget to take a peek at the main article for this scam: The Nigerian / 419 Scam.

Oh, and don’t forget that I’m always interested in seeing new variants of this scam that you might encounter — you can send them in via the Submit an Urban Legend link.

Footnotes:

1.	Also sometimes known as the “Advanced Fees Fraud Scam”.
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2.	Entirely glossing over the fact that you never attempted to help!
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When I first wrote about the Perfumed Bandits email hoax we were living in a different century. It was November 1999, and the same email that has gone on to cause so much concern and alarm around the world was making its way into unsuspecting email inboxes for the very first time.

And this email didn’t mess about. It went straight for the psychologic jugular and didn’t let go, delivering its payload of anxiety and alarm to a host audience that was still trying to adapt to the idea that not everything you receive in your inbox is true or real. Even if it claims otherwise in very big letters…

So, seriously, how alarming is the idea of sinister people lurking in carparks, drugging and robbing victims in broad daylight? Certainly alarming enough that the email above flashed all over the world like wildfire, and in the dying months of 1999 you were a lucky person indeed if you were connected to the internet and hadn’t received a copy of this warning multiple times.

But of course, it simply wasn’t true. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there is no widespread conspiracy to systematically assault and rob unsuspecting victims using ether disguised as perfume.

And yet, just when you thought it was safe to start sniffing perfume samples from random strangers lurking in your local mall’s carpark, there is one story that just might have been the inspiration for the original email.

The Truth Behind The Lie?

Meet Bertha Johnson. In 1999 she was aged 54, and she was a resident of Mobile, Alabama. Bertha made the news in November of 1999 by claiming that she was robbed of $800 after sniffing a perfume or cologne sample offered to her by a stranger while she was on the way to a bank.

While it seems very likely that this is the story on which the popular hoax was based, it bears mentioning that the Mobile Police Department never followed up on Ms Johnson’s allegations by issuing further press releases, nor is there any material in the public domain to suggest that the events that day truly unfolded the way Ms Johnson described them.

Either way, even if the core story is true, it doesn’t stop the email from being an Urban Legend or a hoax.

The thing to understand here is that Urban Legends can definitely be based on true stories. What makes a story an Urban Legend isn’t whether or not it ever happened, it’s whether or not it happens the way the person or email claims it happens [1]. That having been said, the great adventure of Urban Legend research has always been the question, “Where did this story come from?”

So, we can definitely be forgiven for getting a little excited about this press release:

WOMAN DAZED AFTER BEING ASKED TO SMELL UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE

November 8, 1999

File Number: 99-11-1543

On Monday, November 8, 1999, at approximately 2:30 p.m. Officers from the Third Precinct responded to the World of Wicker, at 3055 Dauphin Street. When the Officers arrived the victim, 54-year-old Bertha Johnson of the 2400 block of St. Stephens Road, advised she was rendered unconscious after smelling an unknown substance. Johnson was approached by an unknown black female, who was described as follows: slim build, 120-130 pounds, 5 feet 7 inches tall and was last seen wearing a Leopard print wrap on her head and large gold loop earrings. The victim told Investigators the incident occurred at the Amsouth Bank at 2326 Saint Stephens Road. After the victim-regained consciousness she discovered her property missing from her purse and her vehicle. The MOBILE POLICE DEPARTMENT is advising the public to be on alert for this type of activity.

Corporal Paul Soulier is currently investigating this case anyone with additional information regarding this case is asked to contact the Mobile Police Department at (334) 208-7211 or (334) 208-1770.

Officer DaVon Grey Public Information Officer

Source: Mobile Police Department Press Release (archive.org)

Wait a minute! That sounds like this story is true!

Okay, let’s take a break from our impromptu celebration and talk a little bit about why we would still think this Urban Legend is false, even though we found an example in which it looks very much like it was true.

To do that, we should compare the two pieces of information we have, the email and the press release, against each other to see what falls out.

Straight away you can see that the email doesn’t mention where the event took place, while the press release is very specific with these details. Let’s say you lived in Mobile, Alabama, and you sent that email to a friend a couple of towns away. That sounds reasonable, right? After all, maybe they should be concerned too? But your friend, wanting to help, sends the email onto a relative who lives in a neighbouring state. Still probably not too far away for the information to have lost its usefulness. But that person forwards the email to a dozen other people, some of whom live in Denver, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or El Paso and so on. Pretty soon, people in Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa – all over the globe! — are opening an email that is warning them about the danger of accepting an invitation from a stranger to test some cheap perfumes.

That’s a good reason to think of the email as an Urban Legend – because instead of communicating to a specific group of people, it shares alarming information in a very generalised way and relies upon the very human tendency to share information ‘just in case’.

Back to the present…

Almost 10 years have passed since this email was first seen in the wild, and incredibly it’s still floating around in email inboxes to this very day.

In fact, I was prompted to write this post because my partner received an updated version of it in her inbox at work just a few days ago!

I’ll post this newer version of the email over the next couple of days, but for now I’m going to wrap up this post by inviting you to leave comments below, and also if you encounter other versions of this email please send them in via the Submit an Urban Legend link and I’ll post them up as well.

Further reading…

Okay, well maybe I’ll add one more bit. There is some excellent reading to be found on the internet that examines this hoax from every possible direction including sideways.

To point out just a few:

• Parking Lot Perfume Robbers from the always amazing Snopes.com
• The Knockout Perfume from the incredible David Emery at About.com

Murray By Moonlight

Photograph by Melody

Footnotes:

1.	There are some other factors that need to be present before you can definitively say you’re dealing with an Urban Legend, but I’ll talk about them about at greater length in other posts.
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Remember the Microsoft Money Giveaway email? The one that promised bucketloads of cash for forwarding the email to as many people as you could, because Microsoft had invented an email tracker and apparently wanted to reward people for filling the Internet with spam? Hands up anyone who knows anyone who received any money from it?

Or the one that said that aspartame, used in artificial sweeteners, was making people rot from the inside out?

Or the one that came with the soundfile that when you played it, could tell you your name, star sign and was able to answer basic questions about geometry? [1]

Amidst receiving all of those emails, did you ever wish you could send one back that described what it would be like if you followed all of that urgent advice?

If you answered, ‘Hell, yes!’, then you’re not alone…

It seems someone has done that very thing, and while your mileage may vary on exactly how funny it is, if at all, I know I got a chuckle out of it as someone who spent a lot of time trying to let people know that chain emails aren’t necessarily the best way to learn about what’s really happening in the world.

Have you received a chain email recently that you’d like to share with ulblog readers? Send it in via the submit an urban legend link, and I’ll put it up on the site.

Footnotes:

1.	It’s very possible that I made that one up.
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Almost six years later, and it appears that the Nigerian Scam is still going strong.

In a way, I’m a little surprised that so many people still fall for the Nigerian Scam. It’s received plenty of coverage both in the media and on the net, and a couple of minutes invested using a search engine for anyone wondering if the email might be legitimate would probably have saved a lot of people a lot of money.

That having been said, recent news from my very own home state of Queensland indicates that people still fall victim to this scam.

Aussies lose $7m to Nigerian scammers
Feb 02, 2006

AUSTRALIANS have lost more than $7 million in the notorious Nigerian investment scam – and police fear that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Queensland police fraud inspector Brian Hay said police had analyzed financial transactions to Nigeria for a two-month period and contacted about 60 per cent of the people involved.

Of those, 25 out of 26 were victims of the internet-based scam and only one had conducted legitimate business with Nigerian contacts.

“We were just completely blown away,” Insp Hay said.

“We’re talking about financial planners, accountants, people that perhaps should know better.”

Insp Hay said victims, who had received spam e-mails from the fraudsters, were sucked into the scheme by promises of up to $40 million for the temporary use of their bank accounts.

Source: news.com.au

If it’s surprising that people still fall for the Nigerian Scam, it’s utterly amazing that financial planners and accountants should number among them!

And yet, according to a US Secret Service advisory (see Further Reading below) in 2002, hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year to Nigerian Scams and its variants.

Anatomy of a Scam

While the Nigerian Scam comes in many different forms and is now operated from many different countries, initial contact with potential victims usually follows a set pattern. To begin with, you receive an email that looks much like this:

The actual details of the email can vary considerably from the above, but generally they have the following things in common:

• The person contacting you needs access to a bank account or agent to secretly transfer a very large amount of money out of his or her country. Sometimes the money is said to have been discovered left lying idle in an account that no-one has accessed for years – perhaps due to the death of the person or persons who originally owned the account, perhaps because the money was set aside for a government or military contract that was never commissioned, etc – and at other times the money is described as requiring secret transfer because it will be used as part of a deal that a wealthy individual wishes to keep secret until completion
• The person contacting you needs what seems like simple assistance to transfer the money out of the country in question, so that it can be distributed amongst interested parties
• A significant amount of the total is being offered to you for providing that assistance
• Often a sense of urgency is communicated, with the email claiming that an audit is under way and if the money isn’t transferred quickly then access to it will be lost forever, etc

Once a potential victim has responded to this email – which is sent to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people at a time – a cat and mouse game begins in which the promise of the very large payout is held just out of arm’s reach as ‘complications’ arise that require the victim to ‘invest’ money to solve. Usually the amounts requested at the beginning are small, perhaps a few hundred dollars at most. But as the scam develops, the requests become larger and larger and simply don’t stop until the victim realizes he or she has been scammed, or literally has no more money they can beg, borrow or – all too often – steal to satisfy the ongoing demands.

Variations on a Theme

The canonical version of the Nigerian Scam has seen many changes and mutations over the years, with some being operated amateurishly, while others are slick enterprises willing to lease all the trappings of a legitimate business if the payout seems promising.

Some other versions of the scam are:

There are almost certainly many more versions and variations of the Nigerian Scam currently in operation, with still many more to come.

If you have received an interesting or new version of the scam, send it in via the submit an urban legend link, and I’ll share it with other readers of ulblog.

Further Reading

• Advance fee fraud
• More examples of Nigerian Scam emails
• US Secret Service advisory on the Nigerian Scam

Footnotes:

1.	Also known as an Advanced Fees Fraud and the 419 Scam, after the relevant section in the Nigerian criminal code that covers fraud operations such as these.
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