Anatomy of a Hoax

I have a bad attitude about electronic chain letters. To my mind, they're a scourge, a virus, a plague on the Internet community. Most often, they're outright hoaxes. No matter what their stated purpose, chain letters rarely accomplish anything beyond wasting bandwidth and conferring on people who pass them along the sense of having done a good deed without expending an ounce of effort.

The "David Lawitts" chain letter is a particularly galling specimen. Its premise, stolen from similar schemes, is that some charitable organization will donate a pittance to cancer research every time the letter is forwarded. It struck me as a hoax the first time I read it. The details of the letter are so sketchy and the scheme outlined in it so nonsensical that the thing fairly debunks itself - or so it seemed to me. But no sooner had I branded it a fake and posted it to our archive of legends than I began receiving notes from readers asking me if I could prove it's not authentic.

Mea culpa. My bad attitude got the better of me. Clearly, the letter's inauthenticity is not as self-evident as I thought, nor should anyone be willing to take my word for it. To make amends, I offer the following attempt to demonstrate, point by point, that the Lawitts letter is a hoax.

First, the letter itself, verbatim:

Hello. My name is David Lawitts and I have severe lung and throat cancer due to second hand smoke. This chain was a final attempt to help solve my problem.

For every one person that this letter is sent to, the national lung and cancer association will donate 3 cents to help me and other people like me become healthy again. If you do not pass this letter on, my life and memory will soon both be gone.

So please, try to send this to at least 10 people. It is for a good cause. (By the way, be sure one of the people you send it to is "[email address deleted]" as he keeps track of the names that have passed this along.)

I give my blessing to those who pass this along. To those too selfish to take 2 minutes to do this, what goes around comes around.

Thank you.

Count me among the "selfish" ones. Notice how the author tries to snare us both ways - by offering his blessing if we do as we're asked, threatening bad karma if we don't. Crass emotional manipulation. It's typical of these sorts of letters, and a major reason to distrust them.

The text itself is both factually and logically unsound. Let's examine a few of its weaknesses on each ground:

Point #1: There is no such organization as "the national lung and cancer association." It simply doesn't exist - a fatal blow to the letter's credibility. (We could stop right there.)

Point #2: There is an American Cancer Society, as well as an American Lung Association. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the letter's author meant to refer to one or both of these actual organizations. The relevant question would then be: are they, in fact, participants in this chain letter appeal?

The answer is no, they are not. This was quite easy to establish.

There's a statement on the ACS Website which says: "No fundraising efforts are being made by the American Cancer Society using chain letters of any kind."

Although I couldn't find a similar statement on the ALA Website, it was simple enough to call their national headquarters, where I spoke with ALA representative Carolyn Derrick. She was delighted to tell me for the record that "the American Lung Association does not and would never participate in any chain letter schemes."

Point #3: The framing of the personal appeal for help makes no sense. "This chain was a final attempt to help solve my problem," the author writes. How is it supposed to do that? The alleged problem he refers to is "severe lung and throat cancer" - a phrasing which indicates the disease is at an advanced stage. Are we supposed to think that this chain letter is going to result in funding, research, and treatment in time to save this guy's life?

Point #4: Frankly, the whole scheme makes no sense. Consider the defining purpose of organizations such as the ACS and the ALA: to collect funds and apportion them to financing cancer research and treatment. Then consider what the chain letter asks us to believe: that each of us must forward it to 10 other people in order to get these organizations to do what they already do.

Point #5: More than one version of the letter exists, as I discovered by searching the Web and Usenet. The usual variable among the different versions is the email address to which copies are to be sent for purposes of "keeping track of the names." I found that at least four different addresses have been used. There have no doubt been more.

The "mutation" most damaging to the credibility of the Lawitts letter is the Tamara Martin letter, which is virtually identical to the former except that this new name has been substituted for Lawitts'. Will the "real" cancer victim please step forward?

Point #6: Tracking down the owners of the aformentioned email addresses yields interesting results. On the version of the letter I received, the address belongs to an America Online member who goes by the screen name "SykoJoe" (with some numerals appended). His email account is currently still active, so I looked up his AOL profile to see if there was any mention in it of involvement in charitable enterprises. What I found instead was a declaration to the effect that his favorite pastime is meeting women online. I sent a message asking if the owner of the screen name knows anything at all about the chain letter campaign. There was no reply.

Point #7: The Lawitts letter bears telltale resemblances to several other bogus chain mail appeals, which indicates it's a scam cribbed from other scams. This, too, can be verified by some research online, but to save everyone the trouble, here's the best single source of relevant information I've found: Barbara Mikkelson's article on the Jessica Mydek hoax, from the Urban Legends Reference Pages.

Before I close, let me anticipate a possible objection to the case I've made: namely, that I neglected to address the question of whether or not David Lawitts actually exists.

My response would be this: trying to determine if there really is such a person would be time-consuming, almost certainly fruitless, and utterly beside the point. In every other respect the letter is demonstrably a hoax, which makes the matter of David Lawitts' existence - however interesting - irrelevant.

The guy's an urban legend. That's good enough for me.

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