I got this email Parents must read

niapage

niapage

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To all parents and grandparents Beware: McDonalds, Chuck E
Cheese, Discovery Zone... Some of you might not be parents, but you may have nieces, nephews, grandchildren or friends with children. This will
pertain to you too. As I read the following, my heart sank. I urge each and every one of you to pass this on to as many people as you can. I cannot stress how important this is! This is very disturbing news. Our son lost his watch and was very upset. We dug and dug in those balls, trying to find the watch. Instead, we found vomit, food, feces, and other stuff I do not want to discuss.I went to the manager and raised hell. Come to find out, the ball pit is only cleaned out once a month. I have doubts that it is even done that often. My kids will never play in another ball pit.
Now read this: Hi. My name is Lauren Archer, my son Kevin and I lived in Midland,TN. On October 2nd, 1999 I took my only son to McDonald's for his 3rd birthday. After he finished lunch, I allowed him to play in the ball pit.
When he started whining later I asked him what was wrong, he pointed to the back of his pull-up and simply said 'Mommy, it hurts." I couldn't find anything wrong with him at that time. I bathed him when we got home, and it was at that point when I found a welt on his left buttock. Upon investigating, it seemed as if there was something like a splinter under the welt. I made an appointment to see the doctor the next day, but soon he started vomiting and shaking, then his eyes rolled back into his head. From there, we went to the emergency room. He died later
that night. It turned out that the welt on his buttock was the tip of a hypodermic needle that had broken off inside. The autopsy revealed that Kevin had died from a heroine overdose. The next week, the police removed the balls from the ball pit. There was
rotten food, several hypodermic needles: some full, some used, knives, half-eaten candy, diapers, feces, and the stench of urine. If a child is not safe in a child's play area then where? You can find the article on Kevin Archer in the October 10,1999
issue of the Midland Chronicle.
Please forward this to all loving mothers, fathers and anyone who loves and cares for children! Don't think it's just McDonald's either or that this is something that just started. When my oldest son who is now 9 was small the area Burger King closed their play area
for awhile for "remodeling" because in another town there had been an incident similar to the one described above that happen @ a Burger King. A little boy had been playing in a ball pit
started complaining of his legs hurting. He later died too. He was found to have bites all over his legs buttocks. When they cleaned the ball pit they found that there was a copperhead nest in the ball pit. He had suffered
numerous bites .from a very poisonous snake Repost this if it scares the @*!+ out of you! Repost this if you care about our kids
AND FYI: In Florida and other places on the East Coast a group of people are putting HIV/AIDS infected and filled needles underneath gas pump handles, so when someone reaches to pick it up and put gas in their car, they get stabbed with it. 16 people have been a victim of this crime so far and 10 tested HIV positive. Instead of posting that stupid crap about how your love life will suck for years to come of you don't re-post, post
this. It's important to inform people, even if you don't drive, a family member might, and what if they were next? CHECK UNDER THE
HANDLE BEFORE YOU GRAB IT!!! IT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE!



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OH MY God.......................
dude i just copyed this and I am sending it to everyone i know............I feel absolutly sick reading that............what the hell is wrong with people........????
STAR
 
Yeah............but dude..........go crawl through the ball pit in McDEEs and see what you find:eek: :confused: .......... it is gross!!!!!


I
 

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I don't know about the ball pit story but I can attest to the the filth of those play areas. My son and I had some time on our hands (he was about 3 at the time) and we went to a McD with a playscape. After we ate I allowed him to play for a while. There was another mother with a toddler and baby. I saw some commotion and heard her arguing with the toddler but it was in a language I do not speak. They left and minutes later I happened to look and saw feces on the floor. The toddler had crapped himself and left it everywhere. I immediately called my son out and called an employee over. Not only was it outside the play area- it was in the tubes they crawl in and who know where else. I have little faith the employee cleaned it to my satisfaction. Needless to say we don't do those anymore. ICK
 
True enough... But....

We all know those Ball Pits can be disgusting. That really should be nothing more than common sense really. Think of all the disgusting things that end up being placed, poured or buried in sand boxes by humans and or animals, and it is the same story. Not where I would want my kids to play.

However, here is a little article about internet hoaxes that, as an IT professional I think is far more important. Internet hoaxes and the people who perpetuate them do far more physical damage than most people think, and definitely more than a stinky ball pit ever could. Here is an exerpt from a good article:

"What Are Internet Hoaxes and Chain Letters?

Internet hoaxes and chain letters are e-mail messages written with one purpose; to be sent to everyone you know. The messages they contain are usually untrue. A few of the sympathy messages do describe a real situation but that situation was resolved years ago so the message is not valid and has not been valid for many years. Hoax messages try to get you to pass them on to everyone you know using several different methods of social engineering. Most of the hoax messages play on your need to help other people. Who wouldn't want to warn their friends about some terrible virus that is destroying people's systems? Or, how could you not want to help this poor little girl who is about to die from cancer? It is hard to say no to these messages when you first see them, though after a few thousand have passed through your mail box you (hopefully) delete them without even looking.

Chain letters are lumped in with the hoax messages because they have the same purpose as the hoax messages but use a slightly different method of coercing you into passing them on to everyone you know. Chain letters, like their printed ancestors, generally offer luck or money if you send them on. They play on your fear of bad luck and the realization that it is almost trivial for you to send them on. The chain letters that deal in money play on people's greed and are illegal no matter what they say in the letter.


The Risk and Cost of Hoaxes

The cost and risk associated with hoaxes may not seem to be that high, and isn't when you consider the cost of handling one hoax on one machine. However, if you consider everyone that receives a hoax, that small cost gets multiplied into some pretty significant costs. For example, if everyone on the Internet were to receive one hoax message and spend one minute reading and discarding it, the cost would be something like:

50,000,000 people * 1/60 hour * $50/hour = $41.7 million

Most people have seen far more than one hoax message and many people cost a business far more than $50 per hour when you add in benefits and overhead. The result is not a small number.

Probably the biggest risk for hoax messages is their ability to multiply. Most people send on the hoax messages to everyone in their address books, but consider if they only sent them on to 10 people. The first person (the first generation) sends it to 10, each member of that group of 10 (the second generation) sends it to 10 others or 100 messages and so on.

Generation: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Number of Messages 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000

As you can see, by the sixth generation there are a million e-mail messages being processed by our mail servers. The capacity to handle these messages must be paid for by the users or, if it is not paid for, the mail servers slow down to a crawl or crash. Note that this example only forwards the message to 10 people at each generation while people who forward real hoax messages often send them to many times that number.

Recently, we have been hearing of spammers (bulk mailers of unsolicited mail) harvesting e-mail addresses from hoaxes and chain letters. After a few generations, many of these letters contain hundreds of good addresses, which is just what the spammers want. We have also heard rumors that spammers are deliberately starting hoaxes and chain letters to gather e-mail addresses (of course, that could be a hoax). So now, all those nice people who were so worried about the poor little girl dying of cancer find themselves not only laughed at for passing on a hoax but also the recipients of tons of spam mail. "

Seriously people....
The bottom line is all these internet hoaxes are nothing but that, hoaxes designed to make us feel sympathy or fear enough to "warn all our friends" which in turn floods corporate and private email servers requiring upgrades and updates. This in turn increases the cost of running that server. From the corporate position that means bigger budgets for the IT department and less salary increases for the staff. From an internet service providers perspective it means needing bigger, faster servers that are paid for by increasing monthly fee's (which we all pay, whether we propogate hoaxes or not)

My professional word of advice, any time you see some heart wrenching or scary little piece of advice that tells you to "send this to everyone you know now!" Please google search the information with the word hoax. If it is genuine, you will find out fast. In this case Poor Little Kevin Archer never existed. Someone probably looked at the filth that does exist in a ball pit and decide to make a big deal about it. And maybe it was justified, but it was a lie. And in the long run, that one little lie, and the millions of others out there, cost us not only our precious time and money, but quite possibly our jobs and security in the future.

For more info on hoaxes, this site goes into great detail and will list for you most of the known hoaxes so you can check before potentially starting a million email mass sending of a hoax.




sirant
 
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Thanks for the post sirant, really helpful information. It can sometimes be hard to distinguish between genuine and hoax messages but hopefully this will help identify the fake ones.
 
i dont know if anyone has been getting these emails from africa, saying something along the lines of they are a bank manager/ minister and a client of theirs has died in a plane crash, leaving millions of $$. they want your bank details so they can transfer the money out of the country, giving you a percentage for your trouble. some days i get 2 or 3, do they think we are daft. must have been the biggest ever plane judging by the amount of millionaires who have "died". my daughter gets them too.there are various "scam baiter" type web sites in which people string these hoaxers along. can make funny reading
i also get frequent emails supposedly from various uk banks, stating my account has been violated. can i please log on giving all my security details etc. most of these emails look very convincing, wonder how many people get conned. slim
 
Must be working....

slimby43 said:
i dont know if anyone has been getting these emails from africa, saying something along the lines of they are a bank manager/ minister and a client of theirs has died in a plane crash, leaving millions of $$. they want your bank details so they can transfer the money out of the country, giving you a percentage for your trouble. some days i get 2 or 3, do they think we are daft. must have been the biggest ever plane judging by the amount of millionaires who have "died". my daughter gets them too.there are various "scam baiter" type web sites in which people string these hoaxers along. can make funny reading
i also get frequent emails supposedly from various uk banks, stating my account has been violated. can i please log on giving all my security details etc. most of these emails look very convincing, wonder how many people get conned. slim
Click to expand...

These crooks use bulk emailers to send those emails out by the millions. If even 1% of all the people who recieve them make contact, and a further 1% of those actually give their information it is literally giving the crooks millions of dollars in stolen money. Another scam that is perpetuated by these emails is they are looking for valid email addresses. Every person who responds, whether asking for the money or telling these crooks to get stuffed, is promptly made into a huge list which is then sold to spammers and internet advertisers. If you ever told one of these people to get bent, and now somehow get 50 penis/breast enlargement and viagra emails a day, you now know why.... So these scams can hit you in two ways. Identity theft and valid email address theft.

If it didn't actually work, they would have stopped a long time ago as these scams are as old as the internet itself. The simply fact these emails still come out on such a regular basis is proof positive that this scam is a money maker. Best bet is to never respond, even negatively and delete the emails.

Once again, searching for the message combined with the word hoax will tell you very quickly that you really didn't win the 250 million dollar "secret" internet lottery, you really aren't going to get Mr. So and So from Africa's millions, and for the record, your ding-dong wont get any bigger rubbing the cream on it it either, but it will certainly feel better than giving your bank information out and cost you a hell of a lot less in the long run...


sirant
 
I have a buddy on antoher site who spent a good deal of time scamming the african scammer -and there are websites all over of people who've done the same thing... :) it's hysterical..

If something sounds to good to be true - it generally is...

When an email says to forward this to everyone you know -it's generally scam...

Anyone old enough to remember the classic GOOD TIMES Virus? :D
 
99.999% of the time i will just delete these emails without opening, but i admit once i was so fed up i sent them a "get stuffed" email (but not so politely) - the african ones, not the banks. wish i hadnt after reading sirants reply. however i havnt had any more than normal "junk" emails through since.
i guess there are people out there who do fall for these scams as you say or they wouldnt continue. my worry is i have an online bank account facility, which i check regularly.im a bit of an amateur where computers are concerned but i believe there is spyware which can track your online movements/transactions so to speak. i know people who have been conned this way.they wouldnt get much off me as i never have any money anyway.slim
 
I play on pogo.com where there are lots of different games there,thats where I got the email.
It is hard to believe about the needle's but the urine dirty diapers food ect
I can believe that,the Chuckee cheese by my house had taken there ball pit out a few years ago and I was asumming because of the dirtyness and to think how easy it is to carry viruses and pass them along,most kids 2 and under put balls toys ect in there mouth and I saw alot of that there thats why my younger kids wern't alowd to play in there.
I found the needle under the gas pump creepy and I hope that was a hoax to.
Tammy
 
Even if there aren't heroine needles in the ball pits, I'd still be concerned about germs and urine/feces transmitted on children's hands. Even if they cleaned the pits once a day, you could still have contamination from just one sick/dirty child.
 
Personally, I think that you can find needles anywhere. There's a park by my house, and I took my little brother there once, and he picked up something and brought it over to me, saying, look Jacqui, A diabetic was here! (my mom takes insulin, so he sees the injection) What he actually had in his hand was a drug needle, and I've found at least 5 total over the years.

I'm not saying that all parks have them, but some places are more likely to have drugs done at.
 
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