Social policy ministry employee caught up in e-mail hoax

An employee at the Ministry of Social Policy has had to disassociate herself from an e-mail hoax she forwarded to dozens of people from her ministry e-mail address, after she was inundated with furious calls from government entities.

The e-mail - originating abroad, as an intelligent reading of its text would indicate - carried the false claim that a number of women died after sniffing poisoned samples sent to them, and that the authorities were not letting the public know about the danger, to avoid creating panic.

"The government is afraid that this might be another terrorist act. They will not announce it on the news because they do not want to create panic or give the terrorists new ideas. Send this to all your friends and family members," the e-mail advises.

The claim is untrue, and has been circulating in the US and other countries since November 2001.

However, unlike other e-mail hoaxes which are unwittingly spread from e-mail to e-mail - doing nothing worse than worrying the gullible - this was given a nasty twist as the subject line was changed somewhere along the way to read that it came from the social policy ministry in Malta, giving it some credence.

"I am really anxious to stop it spreading further. It is all the worse because it refers to the 'government' and gives the impression that it is the government here that it is referring to," the understandably anxious employee said.

The e-mail hoax works as it gets sent to dozens of people, who in turn forward it to dozens of others, usually with the best of intentions, believing its contents.

As time passes, the e-mail reaches hundreds of people, including senior people in various government departments and corporations.

The employee, who asked not to be named, was yesterday struggling to work her way through the myriad e-mail addresses it was sent to, sending them another e-mail to disassociate herself from it. The e-mail has gradually made its way from the people on her e-mailing list, to hundreds of people she did not know and over the past few days started arriving at government departments and corporations, as well as at newspapers.

"Some weeks ago, I received an e-mail regarding free samples of perfumes, lotions etc sent by mail, saying that these could be poisonous.

"The e-mail was actually, in my opinion, a spam which inadvertently I forwarded as I thought that it could be true and harmful. Also I am not the originator of this mail as it was forwarded to me by a friend," her second, contrite e-mail admitted.