Hoaxes and Scams
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An Encyclopedia of Claims,
Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural by James Randi
Very handy reference work with excellent pedigree (Randi is a giant in the
field). This is the online version of the book of the same name. [27
Sep 05]
Museum of Hoaxes - curated by Alex Boese
"A hoax is a deceptive act or scheme that plays upon the credulity of others." Catalogues hundreds of hoaxes, often fascinating; each gets its own page with information, links etc.. Some other good stuff too - try the Gullibility Test (hint: not everything is false) and the Hoax Website gallery. [15 Oct 02]
Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia by Dave Gross
Wow. Extraordinarily rich repository of STUFF about frauds, hoaxes, scams, delusions, liars, cheats... "This site covers a lot of strange ground." Indeed. [11 July 02]
Snopes.com
Compendium of urban legends, with useful discussion. See particularly their
25 Hottest Urban Legends.
[21 Jun 05]
Hoaxbusters
"Interspersed among the junk mail and spam that fills our Internet e-mail boxes
are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, Trojans that eat the heart out
of your system, and malicious software that can steal the computer right off
your desk. Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, and
other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone
you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. While hoaxes
do not automatically infect systems like a virus or Trojan, they are still time
consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist. At CIAC,
we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus
and Trojan incidents. These pages describe some of the warnings, offers, and
pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and
that generally do not have any basis in fact. In addition to describing hoaxes
and chain letters found on the Internet, we will discuss how to
recognize hoaxes,
what to do about
them, and some of the
history of hoaxes
on the Internet." [9 Jun 05]
TruthOrFiction.com
"Check out rumors, inspirational stories, virus warnings, humorous tales, pleas
for help, urban legends, prayer requests and calls to action to see if they are
TRUTH! or FICTION!" [9 Jun 05] The IIIS/SCI Conferences by Justin Zobel
Is that seemingly prestigious international conference to which you are thinking of submitting a paper genuine? Possibly not: Justin Zobel submitted three nonsense papers to one conference and they were all accepted. [14 Jun 02]
PhotoFakery by Robert D. Fiete
"Identifying falsified images can be straightforward if you know a few tricks."
[23 Aug 05]
Last updated:
20 Jun 2007 | 
