Fake Amber Alerts urging people to help find imaginary children jostle with phony text messages tales of murderous gang initiations at shopping malls that spread from coast to coast in a matter of hours.
"In some cases, it actually causes an emergency response by law enforcement on unconfirmed information," said Oregon State Police Lt. Gregg Hastings. "It results in the utilization of personnel, resources, time and effort to respond to these hoax reports."
Since 2008, Oregon police have been exasperated by a recurring hoax. It started last year with an Amber Alert that had been genuine -- in Montana, where a 49-year-old woman was accused of abducting her two daughters.
The children were found and the woman arrested, and it was only then that the alert began showing up in text messages in Oregon. Since then, variations keep popping up, Hastings said.
Police have urged people not to forward such messages and to verify the reports. Amber Alerts are high-profile emergencies: a genuine alert will be broadcast on radio and television stations and featured on the Web sites of news organizations.
People can also sign up for Amber Alert notifications on their phones or handheld communications devices through the Web site www.wirelessamberalerts.org.
"If you haven't signed up to receive alerts, and you're getting one on your phone, that should be a red flag," Hastings said.
Unfortunately, such advice seems to be ignored as often as it's heeded, according to David Emery, who writes about urban legends and hoaxes for About.com.
"It's necessary and worthwhile to debunk false rumors, and the police and media do a pretty good job of it overall, but often it's only possible to make a small dent in the onslaught," he said.
Emery's urban legends blog routinely debunks fake gang initiations or hoax Amber Alerts. In some instances, the posts attract hundreds of comments from readers across the U.S. and even other countries reporting they received the hoax messages.
But the messages keep spreading, and not even linking to news reports or official statements debunking the rumors can convince everyone, Emery said.
"People who buy into the rumors tend to direct their skepticism at authority figures like the police and the media instead of the rumors themselves," he said.
For police, there's also no sure way to find out how the rumors started.
State Police in Oregon, for example, have had no luck in tracking down whoever started the hoax alerts in the spring of 2008.
"That is really tough to do, and I have not heard of it happening anywhere," Hastings said.
If a person who starts a hoax is acting out of malice or mischief, though, it goes viral because of the opposite inclination in people, said Paul Murphy, Amber Alert coordinator for the state of Utah.
"The bad thing about this is it's essentially relying on people's good intentions," he said. "They want to help."
Even good intentions have a limit, though, and some worry that too many hoaxes could lead people to ignore a genuine emergency.
"It's sort of the 'cry wolf' phenomenon," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
"Any of these hoaxes, any of these false reports, creates the risk of a seed of doubt in the minds of ordinary citizens, so maybe next time they don't pay as much attention," he said.
That hasn't happened yet with Amber Alerts, Allen said, which he credits with saving the lives of 492 children. But Allen's group regularly fields inquiries about stories of missing children that turn out to be false.
People will have to be increasingly vigilant, Emery warns, when situations like the Montana alert that mutated into an Oregon hoax can happen with border-crossing ease.
"As soon as people gained the ability to copy a rumor to everyone in their address book simultaneously, geographical boundaries became a thing of the past," Emery said. "People in small towns across the country who probably wouldn't know a gang member if they saw one now live in fear of being attacked at Wal-Mart."
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