There are so many hoaxes on the internet that I don't know where to start. I guess one of the most famous ones is the email hoax from Nigeria. It seems that some Nigerians have made it the national pastime to try and hoax internet users out of their hard earned bucks. An email is usually sent that goes something like this. My name is XXX and I am the cousin of a prince from Lagos. My cousin was deported but has 10 million dollars in an off shore bank account. Your name was given to me as an honest person who might be able to help. If you would send me $10,000 to hire people to get this money and transport it to my cousin, he will reward you with half of the 10 million dollars when he gets it. God bless you in advance. It is kind of hard to imagine that anyone would fall for this simplistic type of scam but many have and these emails are still going out so my guess is that a few people still fall for this.

Some hoaxes are more harmless, but hoaxes never the less. There is the famous photograph of a helicopter with a soldier on a ladder beneath it while it is flying over the ocean with a Great White shark leaping out of the water toward the soldier. Copyrights prevent me from showing this photo but it was made by reversing the original helicopter photo and pasting in the shark from another photo showing the shark leaping out of the ocean.

One cruel hoax states that certain email with certain title lines contain a virus. This is false. The sad part is that there are so many viruses out there that the last thing we need are phony warnings. One of these warning says that anything that says "A virtual card for you" is a virus, another says anything with a subject line of "It Takes Guts to Say Jesus" is a virus and so on.

Another hoax that circulated around the internet was about bananas. Yeah bananas, can you believe it? The story went that some bananas contained flesh eating bacteria. This was great for the banana growers I'm sure. When emails were sent a line in the email would state "This is not a joke". As if bananas weren't enough a hoax on Canola oil was perpetrated. The word was circulated that there was a connection between Canola oil and Mad Cow Disease. It stated that animals were fed feed that contained Canola oil and this caused Mad Cow Disease.

The sick child hoax is one of the cruelest. It asks for a donation for a non existent child with cancer and states that even if you don't donate and just forward the email to your friends, for each email forwarded the child will get a donation from some company. This type of hoax is one of the worst.

Then there is the supposed Bill Gates email. This hoax involves receiving an email supposedly from Bill Gates. He tells you that he wants to GIVE you money and all you have to do is forward the email and maybe give him the email addresses of some friends so they too can get some of his money. Anyone that falls for this scam deserves what they get.

A site on the internet claims to have the last photograph ever taken from the World Trade Center. Supposedly it was taken only seconds before the airplane crashed into it and shows a tourist on the roof with the plane heading for the building. The problem is that the photograph shows digital imperfections and the tourist is wearing a winter coat. How did anyone ever get the camera out of the building, the people this high up weren't able to get out ? The tower that the airliner hit didn't have an observation deck, yet the tourist is standing at the observation deck. The plane in the picture is a Boeing 757 the plane that hit the tower was a Boeing 767.

A list of people who were supposedly friends of Bill Clinton and died was put on the internet. The article intimated that to be a friend of Bill Clinton is to die. But even though the list was long, given the amount of people Bill Clinton knows, the amount of people who died were average which is 861 per 100,000. So you see anyone could make up a list like this of people any of us know and it would look long if we knew a lot of people.

An internet hoax was so believed by a California city that the city was deciding on whether to ban foam cups or not. They learned that dihydrogen monoxide was used in the cup's production and believed it was a dangerous chemical. It turned out that dihydrogen monoxide is h20 which is commonly known as water. They were very embarrassed.

A website was established for a nineteen year old girl dying of cancer in Kansas. Every day she added updates to her diary online and after a year she died. The big problem here was after an investigation, it was found that she was never buried. Later on it was found that she never even existed. She was created out of the mind of a 41 year old woman.

So my friends, beware. As they say, if something looks too good, it probably is and remember there are no free lunches. And thank you all for giving me a chance to use those two tired sayings.