Email Hoax

I have great friends who are loving and caring and will do anything to help a friend or stranger in need. This week I received 4 emails about a 13 year old girl named Ashley Flores missing from Philadelphia. This, fortunately, is not a true story.

Before you send emails on, do yourself a favor and click on snopes.com and find out if the story, safety tip, or information is true or false. Snopes updates daily on internet hoaxes and they do great quantities of research to find out if a story is true. They have a search button so you can type in a few keywords about the story you're looking for and it comes up.

You'll find some are true, many are false, and some undetermined. Many of these "urban legends" have elements of truth in them or touch our hearts so they are believable.

These are a few others received in the last few months that have been determined to be false:

Heating plastic in the microwave causes cancer.
Not drinking 8 glasses of water a day leaves you "chronically dehydrated"
Robbers in shopping mall parking lots are using ether-filled perfume bottles to render their victims unconscious.
A patron dining at a Wendy's fast food outlet found a human finger in her bowl of chili

Here is one that is TRUE (for all you cell phone users who get charged for dialing 411 information)
The phone number 1-800-FREE-411 (1-800-373-3411) offers free directory assistance service.

Check out the top 25 legends here