Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

got another one of those forwarded emails today saying Bill Gates will give you 1000 dollars for every person you forward it to, does anyone actually fall for this??? my coworker marina says she forwarded it just in case, JUST IN CASE, lol. how is this real life you know??? it even said "this is not a hoax" at the bottom which is exactly what a hoax would say yes??? if you get it just delete it!!!!

SnowMaiden_1983 wrote:it even said "this is not a hoax" at the bottom which is exactly what a hoax would say yes???

Well, yes. No genuine offer has ever required the caveat "this is not a hoax." The very phrase is an admission of guilt, or at least an anticipation of it. If Mr. Gates wished to distribute his fortune via mass e-mail, one imagines his firm could manage a more sophisticated distribution model than a message forwarded by your coworker Marina, whose judgment on this matter has already proven itself to be questionable.

More to the point: the grammar alone should be enough to kill it. These chain letters never survive contact with a copy editor. I have seen them with two adjectives in a row, with "less" used for countable nouns, and once with a sentence that had no verb at all. If you are going to defraud someone, you might at least conjugate your verbs. -- GV