Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?
Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.
But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax.
For a start, it may be an excellent copy of the BBC website design, but you can probably see the site’s real URL in your browser window. Since it begins “http://bouncewith.me.uk/”, it’s fairly unlikely that this is a serious site.
There are also several typos which would be very unlikely to get though a BBC editor’s proof-reading: this virus is able to restart the heart of it’s victim and There methods, however, have been uneffective.
Of course, many people reading the web don’t care about possessive “its” not having an apostrophe, don’t distinguish between “there” and “their”, and don’t know that the proper word is “ineffective”. Which is presumably why the story has been passed around and taken for real by a number of people.
It’s not that people want it to be real this time, but that they are so panicked by the pandemic that they can’t react rationally. As Randall Munroe at xkcd already realised several days ago:
don't confuse the narrator 