Click on the Avon hugging bear and donate to breast cancer research-Fiction !

Click The Hugging Bear and Donate to Research for Breast CancerFiction!

Summary of eRumor:

The short email says to go to a website where you’ll watch a bear and by visiting the site, be helping donations come in from Avon for breast cancer research.  

The Truth:


This one has a story behind it.

First, the animation of a hugging bear that used to be posted at the link in the email is no longer there.
Instead, you get a message from the owner of the site saying that if you came to the site to help fund Avon breast cancer research, it won’t happen…and that he’s taken the animated bear off the site.

The bear animation was originally on a site belonging to Avon Cosmetics.
Avon says it was part of the company’s commitment to raising money for breast cancer research.
The hugging bear was raising funds for the Avon Flame Crusade Against Breast Cancer that supported the Canadian Breast Cancer Initiative.
For each click of the link, ten cents was donated.
It reached its goal, however, in 2002 and the hugging bear was taken down.

A college student who liked the animation put a link to it on his website, but somehow it became part of an eRumor that claimed that if you go to his site, it’ll help breast cancer research, which was not true.

As of this writing, Avon has begun another fund-raising project using the bear.
In this one instead of a hugging bear, it’s a bear at the end of a tug-of-war rope and the animation shows a tug-of-war and says that for each click, ten cents if being donated to breast cancer research.

Avon began a campaign in 1992 to raise funds for fighting breast cancer and has donated more than $300 million.

Updated 11/4/04