Scarvey column: Think before you forward

Recently, I've been hearing a lot about scams. So many, in fact, that I can't get to them all in one short column.

Have you heard this one?

"Bottle caps for cancer."

It's not new, but apparently, this toxic rumor has surfaced again locally.

There are different variations, but it goes something like this: For every 1,000 caps collected — or 10,000 — a cancer patient will receive one free hour of chemotherapy.

It sounds too good to be true.

And, in fact, it is too good to be true.

Now please note: different organizations — nationally, the Ronald McDonald House and locally, Faithful Friends — do take aluminum pop tab donations and have made quite a bit of money through recycling them. So if you're saving pop tops, don't stop.

My husband and I have taken hundreds of pounds of tabs collected by friends to the Ronald McDonald House in Durham, which is quite happy to receive them.

But if you're saving plastic bottle caps, I'm sorry to tell you that you're wasting your time. No one gets a chemotherapy treatment for 1,000 bottle caps. If you don't want to take my word for it, check out the American Cancer Society Web site, which debunks this and other hoaxes that prey on people's desire to help others.

Normally in scams, somebody benefits. But I'm not sure what anyone gets out of perpetuating the plastic cap hoax, unless it's a warped sense of power from manipulating people.

If you're ever not sure of the veracity of something you've heard or been sent via e-mail, a good place to investigate is snopes.com.

The folks at Snopes will attempt to determine if a rumor is true, if it contains a grain of truth, or of it's simply false.

You can check out claims about aid for Haiti, for example. Yes, you're safe in texting that $10 donation. Yes, T-Mobile is allowing its customers to phone Haiti without being charged for international long distance calls. But no, UPS will not ship packages to Haiti for free. (Local UPS owner Robert Hairston told me he'd gotten phone inquiries from people who'd heard that particular rumor.)

It makes me angry that cancer, and especially children with cancer, are so frequently invoked in hoaxes.

One e-mail that's been widely circulated : A child's dying wish is to have people read her a poem. You're asked to forward it on to others. You may be told that if you do, the American Cancer Society, or AOL, or some other group, will donate three cents to her treatment for each time the e-mail is forwarded.

No. No. No.

As someone who is all too familiar with childhood cancer, I can tell you that every time I get an e-mail about a cancer victim, an e-mail that's been forwarded so many times it's impossible to tell who originated it, I delete it. (If it's about someone local and I can check it out, that's another story.)

I don't want people to stop wanting to help others. But I do think we should all think a bit before we forward e-mails or invest energy and emotion into causes that don't really exist. Contact Katie Scarvey at kscarvey@salisburypost.com.