AOL user Kathleen Fox has lost all her friends after forwarding an email hoax. "How was I to know?", she asked. "It sounded perfectly reasonable to me that Bill Gates would pay me for forwarding email about collecting pull tabs for Craig Shergold to help him pay his modem tax. It had two pages of forwarded headers on it, so it had to be true - I did what it said and forwarded it to everyone I knew. Now no one responds to my emails any more."
Fox's former friend Nora Thomas reports "Yeah, that was the last straw, I've filtered her out now. The occasional fake virus warning was bad enough, but she's up to a three hoax a day habit now. Sometimes, if someone's not willing to help themselves, you've just got to let them go and get on with your life."
Fox told this reporter "I can quit any time I want" while forwarding the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe "just in case it's really true."