By James Keller
The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - It's an online twist on the old myth that collecting enough pop can tabs will help pay for a sick kid's surgery.
E-mails have been floating around the Internet for years claiming that if users forward them to enough people, someone - usually a well-known charity or corporation - will make a donation to a good cause.
And while there is apparently no truth to most of these messages, people continue to pass them along, flooding inboxes, causing headaches for charities and casting doubt on legitimate online campaigns.
"There is no technology, there's no method on the Internet to trace forwarded e-mails," says Rich Buhler, who runs the hoax-busting website truthorfiction.com and says such hoaxes are as widespread today as ever.
"We all like to help someone - it seems like it would be a simple thing to do to simply forward an e-mail. ... We all like to make a difference, we all like to chip in. There's that part of us, if we know it's something we can contribute to, most of us have an inclination to do it."
Some of these e-mails include a name and picture of a sick child, while others promise money to developing countries or disaster relief efforts.
Several charities, including the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the American Red Cross, even have disclaimers on their websites warning users that such e-mail chain letters are fakes.
And muddying the waters even further is the recent surge in Facebook groups promising something similar: donations every time a user joins the group. Some seem legitimate, but most appear just as phoney as the chain mail.
Facebook also features several third-party programs, like the Causes application, which place icons on users' profile pages letting visitors click to make donations with a credit card.
Sorting through it all can be confusing, casting doubt on legitimate fundraising efforts online, says Buhler from southern California.
"People have become gun-shy (about online charities), there's no question about that," he said.
For example, FreeRice.com, a hugely popular online word game connected with the United Nations World Food Programme that donates a few grains of rice every time users provide a correct answer, faced immediate skepticism when it was launched last fall.
Several websites that debunk hoaxes and urban legends have entries about FreeRice.com, confirming that it is, in fact, a real campaign.
Still, the World Food Programme faced questions from the outset about the site's authenticity, says spokeswoman Jennifer Mizgata from Washington, D.C.
"Whenever anyone's actually checked in with us, by the time somebody's found out how to get to us and we confirm it, that's pretty much good enough," says Mizgata.
"They want to know if it's a hoax because they want to know the work that they're doing is going to the right place."
Mizgata says that despite the initial skepticism, the website has been a success, even if people first arrive at the site because they want to see whether it's fake.
Advertisers foot the bill for the donations, and so far enough money has been donated to buy the equivalent of 29 billion grains of rice for the World Food Programme.
"(People are) following through to make sure that it's real, which means that they're coming to our website and learning more about the problem that we're trying to fix at the same time," she says.
Brett Christensen of hoax-slayer.com, another website devoted to exposing Internet hoaxes and scams, predicts that charity hoaxes will be confusing Internet users for some time, even in the face of efforts to discredit them.
One of the reasons, he says, is that it's all too tempting for users to feel like they've contributed by doing very little.
"I might be a cynic, but I'm betting that if the same e-mail message asked the recipient to help by giving a donation to a charity, the compulsion would very often fade away," he says in an e-mail.
"These hoaxes give recipients a chance to experience a brief warm fuzzy feeling for virtually no effort, and for that reason they will probably continue to circulate for a long time to come."
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