fracas

Southwest STD

Last week’s Sunday Snopes feature dealt with misconception that drinking bleach can help a drug user beat a drug test.  That claim was false!

Anyone who uses email is bound to, at some point or another, receive an email containing a ‘warning’ about some terrible crime or event that they should beware of. These emails always tell the recipient to pass it along to everyone they know in order to warn others and ’save’ someone else from the same terrible fate. Most often, these emails contain some sort of claim relating the event or crime in the warning, to a specific location or police department in order to convince the recipient of its authenticity.

In mostly every case, these email warnings are hoaxes, nothing more than malicious chain letters that scare the uninformed into becoming pawns in the spamming of hundreds of thousands of people.

Snopes.com is a credible place to verify such stories you might receive. As a regular Sunday feature, fracas will highlight a different story each week to do our part in stopping or lessening the impact of the distribution of such stories.

Sunday Snopes Snippets

Sunday, June 3, 2007:

Claim: Southwest Airlines provides free air travel to those who have AIDS or herpes.

Status: False

[Quote Snopes] “This curious e-mail began reaching us in late April 2007. In response to the many readers who have asked us about this, the answer is no, it’s not true. Were Southwest Airlines (SWA) handing out $10,000 gift cards to those with sexually transmitted diseases, you wouldn’t just be finding out about the freebie via a loopy e-mail from an unnamed person; you’d be hearing about it on CNN and reading about it in your daily newspaper.

There’s a remote possibility that whoever penned this “helpful” heads up was genuinely confused by one of the three-letter abbreviations Southwest uses on its web site to identify various hotel rate plans associated with its Rapid Rewards program: STD is the three-letter code associated with its Traveler’s Discount. While “STD” in another setting could well stand for “sexually transmitted disease,” in this one it means “Southwest Traveler’s Discount.” [End Quote Snopes]

For other details regarding this story please click here to read the full snopes.com write-up.

Please bookmark fracas. Your next Sunday Snopes feature will be posted on Sunday, June 10, 2007!