RA: All those fun hoax emails!

I think all of us email users can attest to receiving some bogus email declaring great prizes or happiness by passing along the received email. In accordance with this, I’ll be analyzing my most recently received hoax as well as all looking generally at all the emails that follow the same basic rhetoric.
The main question here is what are the consequences of passing on this email to other people on my economic welfare? Easy! Passing on this email will skyrocket my economic welfare because passing on this email will guarantee that I receive hundreds of Bill Gates’ money. Obviously, the implicit assumption works! Of course anything that guarantees my receiving Bill Gates’ money will improve my economic welfare. These type of emails mainly focused to whoever anyone without much technical knowledge or those hopefuls who desire to reap the “guaranteed” results–really, these emails are aimed at the naive nice people of the world. The emails generally appeal to lots of authoritative figures such as Microsoft, Intel, “real lawyers,” big newspapers or any other thing which gives authority to the argument. The biggest argument here is the chance that this email is actually legitimate–you might actually win big or a new virus might fry your hardware if you don’t delete something off your computer. Especially in this specific email the logical argument is made, what have you got to lose! Just try it! Which is very appealing because, it’s a true statement! The argument is not sufficient (no evidence), it’s the normal typically grandiose (either in benefits or mayhem) style email, the information is definitely not accurate and the relevancy is good–normal people got money. Why even my brother’s girlfriend got money!
In the end the best thing these emails have going for them is the logical statement, what if this were true and what have I got to lose to pass it along? In this manner they can be quite effective, especially to the naive (virus warnings are particularly good against these). For myself, I had to learn how to discern between hoaxes and legitimate emails. Just google the part about whatever their authoritative figure said and you’ll get ten different anti-hoax websites. However, until more people are aware of how to spot these, I’m positive I’ll be getting a lot more of them!
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/ms-money-giveway-hoax.html