Visit a Web Address And See Your Baby Pictures Or an Instant Snapshot Online-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
This message comes in various forms. Some simply give a web address that says it has a picture of you posted. Others pretend to have installed a feature that can actually take your picture while you look at your screen and ask you to sit still for a moment, then click the screen to see the picture that has been taken. The most popular one, however, claims to have collected nursery pictures from thousands of hospitals and suggests that yours may be one of the baby pictures in its database. You are invited to visit the site for free to view it.
The Truth:
Anybody who has proceeded to any of the websites in these emails has discovered that instead of seeing a picture of themselves, they end up viewing a humorous picture. In some cases, it’s an adult or baby chimpanzee. In others, is a picture of a grotesque human being. In some, it’s a picture of a baby making an obscene gesture.
Many of our readers, however, have been wary and have not visited the web addresses, and have written us to ask how anybody could have secured so many baby pictures or what kind of technology could use your computer monitor to take your picture. The concerns, of course, are based on the desire for privacy.
Most of the time, if you visit the site, there will be no harm experienced.
One of the sites, offering baby pictures, however, is really slimy.
First, it says you have received the email because you are on their email list. None of the people who forwarded us the emails they received was actually on their list and none of the emails was sent to the person’s email address…so the emails were sent in the form and technique of spammers.
Then if you go to the site, you are asked for your name, birth date, and birth place, which many people prefer not to simply hand out over the Internet.
Then after you’ve seen the funny picture, you are invited to submit other people’s email addresses so they can enjoy the joke as well.
When you try to exit the site, you are besieged with pop-up screens of advertisements that feels like an assault.
Finally, at the bottom of the email is a link you can click to be removed from their mailing list if you wish. It claims to be programmed to “automatically” remove your email address, but that’s untrue. When you click the link, you are asked to input your email address which, of course, is necessary since most of the emails were not sent to any specific address. If you input your email address to be removed, the chances are you are actually giving them your email address and ending up on a list.