Charity Hoaxes Tug Cynically at Heart Strings

More of this Feature • Part 2: Social Engineering 101

Related Resources • Chain Letters: From Snail Mail to Email • Further Adventures in Email Tracking • Current Netlore

Elsewhere on the Web • Chain Letter Evolution • Why Forwarded Email Can't Be Tracked

By David Emery

What do Rachel Arlington, Jessica Mydek, Timothy Flyte, Amy Bruce, Kalin Relek, Fatima Hareez, Jada Cohen, Jermaine Beerman, Rick Connor and Tamara Martin have in common?

For one thing, they've all been named in email chain letters as young people dying of horrendous diseases.

For another, they don't exist. All the chain letters are cynical hoaxes.

More precisely, they're all variants of the same cynical hoax, the Jessica Mydek letter, which first appeared on the Net in January 1997.

Little Jessica, said the email, is dying of terminal brain cancer and has but six months to live. To honor her "dying wish," the American Cancer Society and corporate sponsors have supposedly agreed to donate three cents to cancer research for each time the message is forwarded. So please, please forward it to everyone you know.

Bunk. The American Cancer Society said it had never heard of Jessica Mydek.  "No fundraising efforts are being made by the American Cancer Society using chain letters of any kind," the organization vowed.

Commentators at the time decried the hoax message as an adolescent prank and took delight in observing that "Jessica Mydek," when pronounced aloud, sounds suspiciously like "Just sucka my [expletive]."  (Indeed, the surname "Mydek" is so rare that Web searches on it yield only references to this hoax.)

Nevertheless, folks everywhere succumbed to the chain letter's emotional hook, and it became extremely popular among frequent forwarders, spawning new variations almost immediately. In all, more than a dozen variants have made the rounds since 1997, each circulating in the name of a nonexistent victim and each promising charitable donations that will never be made.

The variant below appeared in August 2000, purporting to have been written by George Arlington, the father of a 10-year-old girl named Rachel, who is dying of brain cancer. (Another version circulating since February 2001 includes a poem entitled "To My Child."  This was followed by a March 2002 variant claiming Rachel Arlington is 10 months old, with a photo of an unknown infant attached.)

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