No, Bill Gates won’t send you money: A history of email hoaxes

The first email spam in history happened right after the invention of email. In 1978, electronic mail was still part of the Department of Defense’s ARPANET project—the predecessor to the Internet—and programmer Gary Turk sent a notice to approximately 400 people advertising the demonstration of a new computer for his company. While not exactly a scam or a hoax, it was considered egregious enough to offend the mostly research-based users of the early Internet.

A photo of a laptop installing a system update

Scam emails have been part of electronic communication since the very beginning. And today’s scammers and spammers use similar tactics to attract your attention, convince you to pony up sensitive information, and lure you into a false sense of security—or something that’s too good to be true. Since the late 1970s, the style and sophistication of email scams and hoaxes has evolved, yet the fundamental aspect is still the same: to get you to believe something that is not true. Take a trip down the memory lane of the wild and unsecure Internet so you can know why it’s important to stay safe online.

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Phishing attacks

In the mid to late 1990s America Online, the bastion of the early Internet, led to the rise of phishing attacks. Around this time, hackers posing as AOL employees reached out to thousands of users to collect their login and credential information through spoof emails and Instant Messenger accounts. They adopted the “phishing” term from the phone phreakers who preceded them by hacking telephone systems. Today, phishing is still prevalent, evolving with the Internet as online shopping, banking, and money transfers became part of our lives.

“The chain letter message gave rise to a cottage industry of hoaxes, not necessarily with any monetary value (at least, none too apparent) but designed to spread by word of mouth—whose sole function is replication.”

Email hoaxes

Common email hoaxes from the early 2000s relied on the inexperience of the average email user to know about technical things. Many of these email hoaxes claimed:

A wealthy figure like Bill Gates was going to give every Microsoft user $100.
You’ve been selected to win an iTunes gift card.
Elvis was, in fact, still alive—just follow the link for the proof.
A small child was dying of a terminal disease, and if you forward this to ten people, they’ll get a donation.

This last example of an email message gave rise to a cottage industry of hoaxes, not necessarily with any monetary value (at least, none too apparent) but designed to spread by word of mouth—whose sole function is replication.

Chain letters

Those of a certain generation may remember chain letters: if you want the one you have a crush on to notice you, forward this message to 10 people in your address book to be lucky in love. If you break the chain, you’ll have a lifetime of bad luck. For those who came of age around the early 2000s-2010s, preying on adolescent feelings such as teenage love, school popularity, or good fortune was an indelible part of the nascent Internet.

Nigerian prince scams

The most common form of phishing scam that ensued afterwards was commonly known as the “Nigerian prince” scam, because of the percentage of emails that claimed to have arisen from Nigeria.

The average American’s understanding of West African politics notwithstanding, and the emails usually maintained the same story: there was the promise of a few million dollars, to be given to a stranger who was willing to help settle an inheritance, a hidden cache of money, or embezzled funds seized by officials. But to do so, this stranger had to put up some money—a paltry sum compared to the millions by result, but still in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Naturally, the millions of dollars would never turn up. But the idea was so lucrative—in fact, dating back to the Spanish Prisoner scam of the 18th century—that in certain countries, this grew to be an underground industry. Better known as advanced-fee scams, the hackers who perpetuate them still rake in hundreds of million dollars per year.

Fake news

Today’s phenomenon of fake news has taken the email hoax to its natural successor: social media, which has a wider and more immediate impact than the email chains of yore. Social media hoaxes range from the political to the celebrity-obsessed, and carry the potential to not only spread instantaneously, but to do real-world damage. And in the last few years, they’ve only been exacerbated by global events.

It pays to recognize a scam, a hoax, a phishing attempt, or fake news, no matter where you’re reading it—because the costs could be devastating. Being a savvy media consumer means you can keep your personal and sensitive information safe, away from the kind of hackers who have been there since the Internet’s very beginning.