to be embarrassed for falling for this urban myth

[yesway]

I just forwarded an email and everyone who I sent it to spotted it as an urban myth straight away.

It's the one where baddies put a doll in a car seat by the side of the road covered with a blanket and you stop the car and get attacked.

It was coupled with the one where the baddies throw eggs at your windscreen which when you try and wipe it causes a 92.5% reduction in visibility (how could I not have seen the lie in that figure alone??) and then you stop and they attack you.

[ blush]

p.s. I'm hoping to find some hard evidence from some of you that this is in fact true

The Bristol Cribbs Causeway one I heard, was a young boy taken to loos, hair shaved and baseball cap put on, in John Lewis, would have been 12/13 years ago.

Yep, I believed it too

It happened in my (north west) Asda too

oh it happened in my east london tesco too. those gypsies with scissors get around don't they?

It apparently happened in Asda in Manchester earlier this year too. Busy bees those gypsies.

It's just another chain mail. And I get so fed up with people forwarding these to me.

This one (carseat/doll) has been forwarded to me twice this month, once via work and once by an aquaintence. And I've seen it years before too.

I had to tell the well meaning aquaintence yet again it's just a rubbish chain mail. SHe replied it's genuine as she got it from a reliable source!

SO I let it go and I said (again) if she has to forward this stuff to me could she at least bcc not cc me in as I don't want my email details passed on indefinitely for spammers worldwide.

Why do some people just not get it! I mean falling for the stuff, ok I can accept that some people are a bit naive and gullable. But to cc people rather than bcc, that's just ridiculous. Do you hand your friends home address out to perfect strangers willy nilly? No. So don't do it with my private email address either.

And breathe....

Our local Asda was also apparently invaded by child-snatching, hair-cutting types. Only they were Polish. But I suppose they might have been Polish gypsies.
My boss's local Tesco was apparently a haven for child-snatching, hair-dying Somalians. Possibly pirates? It seems that stealth hairdressing is a multi-cultural practice.....

I heard a really horrible story the other day that happened to a friend of a friend which I'm really hoping IS an urban legend. Can't find it on Snopes though :(

The hair cutting boys clothes one turned up as a storyline on CSI a couple of years ago too.

The Polish dye the hair of toddlers in our local Sainsbo's too. And the staff in the garage drop your card on the floor accidentally and then scan it while you're not looking, stealing your identity in seconds.

I've bricked up my windows and doors. Can't be too careful. They're everywhere.

olderandwider that's a film I think. . .happens at the beginning but I can't remember the name of it!

I hope you got a polish builder to do the bricking up. Sneaky child stealth hairdressers they may be, but their building skills are of a superior quality.....

I blame The Real Hustle.

. . .the woman ends up running over the attacker. . .

I've just thought of another. I had a well meaning email from someone I knew vaguely when we lived in Bangkok. She urged me to sack our homehelp who came from Burma as 'they are well known kidnappers of children'. I was furious, this woman was kindness and patience personified and asked her to provide proof. Oddly enough she couldn't but knew friends of friends whose children had been taken and held for ransom.

There was one of these going round a few years ago about how "nasty people" (my description) were leaving syringes on cinema seats.

DH runs a cinema and had loads of calls about it. What's worse is that the dds' school at the time actually sent out letters to parents warning about this...incredible!

I actually wrote to the school & suggested they check this type of story out on snopes or similar before sending out scaremongering letters...

Hello kreecher thought you had disappeared off the planet. What a horrid story. Some people will just fwd any old rubbish. I had the urban myth of the header and deleted it straight away.

Ooh, I remember a syringes one from my youth! Must have been at the height of mid-80's AIDS hysteria in the press. Apparently, Nasty People left syringe needles on water slides at Richmond swimming pool for innocent children to slide onto.

Sometimes it was razor blades, or broken glass.

Or contaminated needles were fixed with chewing gum inside the 'coin return' flap in public phone boxes.

There's probably an entire sub-genre of mid 80's myths concerned with Nasty Sharp Things.

The unreasonable part is forwarding an email on any subject whatsoever.

This was actually printed as a warning in our local news last week.

Oh gawd, I know how this sounds but in a local club, somebody actually was systematically attacking people with hyperdermic needles (I forget what was in them). DH is a copper and was one of the arresting officers when he was finally caught. He wasn't a well man at all. I do remember dh saying at the time that he wonders if people get ideas from these chain emails.

It's rather amazing that all of these gypsies/Polish people/shady types are almost getting away with stealing toddlers and hiding their gender and it's never once been on the news, screeched about in the Daily Mail or warned against in the place in which it happened. Except in hyperbolic, ridiculous emails.

Historically, child abduction (attempted or otherwise), is pretty much universally reported.

Basically, if the warning says anything like "forward this to all your friends" or "tell everyone you know so it doesn't happen to them", that is all I need to prove it's a chain letter and the second-to-last thing I should do is forward it to anyone. (The very last thing I should do is believe a word of it.)

Keep being sent "job offers" by dodgy international-based companies as well. One day one of them may actually be genuine and I'll be missing out by not believing it, but I don't in all honestly think so.

Ha we had a "little girl stolen from Co-op toilets on the IoW" my mum phoned me in a panic and told me to stop letting DD sit in the photo booth whilst I paid, told me a local police officer told her. I believed her but I am scarily gullible, I still check the local soft play for rattlesnake nests after she sent me an email saying "39% of all ball pools are home to rattlesnakes".

moogalicious - I'm sure I read it though - perhaps they made a film of the book?? Oh well, I shall probably wake up in the night and remember it.

IControl.. there was indeed a criminal syndicate that cloned/swiped cards at petrol stations. DH was a victim. It was linked to some sort of funding for Tamil Tigers according to the police.

They seem to go in spates and for some reason especially in the run up to Christmas (maybe all the shopping mall/perfume/chloroform ones anyway). I got a good one from one of my friends once which went along the lines of "Warning from a friend: if a man knocks on your door and asks to see your bum, do not show him your bum. He just wants to see your bum. I feel so stupid now."