Rumours, spam and services

Every so often there goes around a rumour that because of high activity or inactivity the service provider will delete accounts or stop the service from remaining free and urges the recipients to forward the message the everyone in their address books to ensure that their profile is not deleted or to ensure that the service remains free.

I have seen this happen on Yahoo! messenger and now I am seeing this happen on Orkut. This is so naive that I almost end up smiling sardonically at the naivete' of the people forwarding these messages. No service provider will delete profiles just like that or stop the service from remaining free. This is a very harmless prank at best or a way to harvest email addresses at its worst to sell to spammers.

The Orkut rumour started sometime in March / April and Orkut acknowledged the prank and issued a statement to that effect in their news section. Still the message are making rounds and I wonder how many more messages I will get...