Dave Matthews, Email Philanthropist

What a nice guy that Dave Matthews is!  (He's the singer, you know – the one with the band named after himself.) I got an email from him the other day. It says there's this little girl who's dying of cancer, and Dave will give out his personal email address to everyone who helps out by forwarding the message to at least five other people!

Don't believe me? Just check this out...

Isn't that sooooo cool of Dave Matthews? I mean, considering the message must have been forwarded to tens of thousands of people by now, he'll probably have to give up his musical career just to answer all that email. Talk about selfless!

There's one thing I can't figure out, though.

The American Cancer Society says on its Website that "No fundraising efforts are being made by the American Cancer Society using chain letters of any kind."  They seem pretty definite about that. Maybe they made an exception for Dave because he's so famous and everything. I know I would.

'Course, it says in the email: "This isn't a chain letter." But then it also says "Please send this to 19 people." Isn't that a chain letter?

Something else I couldn't figure out is how is anybody keeping track of who sends it and who doesn't? Maybe they have one of those email tracking programs. I bet that's it.

Anyway, a scoffing friend said I should check it out just to make sure, so I did a Web search on Tamara Martin, the little girl who's supposed to be dying of cancer. What do you know, I found a Web page about the Tamara Martin Chain Letter right off the bat!

But guess what. The guy who wrote about it claims it's a hoax.  (Yeah, right – like Dave Matthews would fall for a scam like that.)

He says the Tamara Martin chain letter is just a rip-off of some other scam about a guy named David Lawitts, who's also supposedly dying of cancer. So, I looked that one up, and it turned out that it's supposed to be a hoax, too! It's strange – the David Lawitts letter said almost exactly the same stuff as the Tamara Martin letter – even that bit about "what goes around comes around" (whatever that means).

Not only that, both of those chain letters look way too much like another one that's been floating around the Net for a long time about some little girl named Jessica Mydek. You guessed it – Jessica's dying of cancer, too.

Come to find out, none of these people exist! All these chain letters are just different versions of the same darned hoax. I had to see it to believe it.

Kind of makes you wonder about some people.

Geez, can you believe Dave Matthews actually fell for all that crap? I mean, he's a nice guy and everything, but how gullible can you get?!!

By the way, does anybody know how you can unforward emails you've sent to all you're friends?

Just wondering.

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