Have you heard of www.snopes.com

Here is a very good resource to know about.  If you are like me trusted friends and family whose hearts are in the right place forward you all sorts of crazy or scary e-mails all the time.  Yes their hearts are in the right place but their brains need to catch up at times.

These e-mails take several forms and usually advise you to forward them to everyone on your e-mail list.  I recently got one that carried a warning from a local Chief of Police about the MS-13 gang.  It was marked verified by each person that forwarded it:


Administrators,
Information just received is that the gang MS-13 is currently initiating new gang members and an incident has already occurred. Please share with your staff. The initiation is as follows, several gang members are in a car and do a slow moving tap (accident bump) to your car as you get out to investigate they shoot you.

This is not a joke. If you are involved in a minor accident I strongly recommend you go to a well populated area or lit area if at night and call the police. If any additional information is put out I will share it with you.

Name removed
Chief of Police
Department Removed
Address removed
Schertz, TX 78154
Office: (210) 945-6190
Fax: (210) 945-6193

The only problem with this whole scenario is that it is an Urban Legend that has been around in one form or another since the 80's when it was the Bloods and Crips driving around with no lights after dark.  When you flash your bright lights they will kill you.

Somewhere along the line someone made an effort to make it more official by adding the name and contact information for the Chief of Police for a local department.  However a quick check with snopes revealed it to be nothing more than an urban legend.

These emails can be warnings, Amber alerts, Or my personal favorite Satirical pieces someone published on the internet that get circulated and often have racial or other stereotypes as the basis.  For example here's two headlines I've received in the past month:

"KKK endorses Barrack Obama"
"Federal Judge Bans Black Women From Naming their Children"

Instead of just automatically forwarding these e-mails take a minute to verify them first it very easy to do.  Just go to www.snopes.com and search for the information if it is in fact true they will tell you that and those true ratings are few and far between.  Also don't trust that it has been verified, verify it yourself.  Almost every one of these e-mails claim to have been verified through Snopes but when you go there it's a different story.

Why do you want to verify this stuff first?  Well save your friends some panic, and in some cases free up emergency services resources.  People get these warning e-mails and immediately call police departments to verify it, report imagined leads or find out why something isn't being  done to halt or solve imaginary crime waves.