by Brenda Nelson

Created on: February 13, 2010   Last Updated: February 15, 2010

A hoax is more than a simple lie. A hoax typically involves an act of deception and is designed to trick people into believing or doing something. Hoaxes are often used to fool people for their own enjoyment, or for the amusement of the one playing the hoax.

Hoaxes are also used to raise awareness of issues. They are set apart from scams and cons because no permanent damage is done. Money is not the object of the hoax.

Hoaxes often play on peoples emotions, either sympathy or their sense of wonder. A hoax seems unbelievable but is put forward with such honesty and conviction it is believed.

The word “hoax” has been around since the 1700's, possibly derived from the word “hocus”, meaning “conjurer”. Indeed people have been playing hoaxes for a long time, even before then.

One hoax which was played out for the entertainment of people was one that involved a female tiger and a litter of piglets. The story given was that a grieving mother tiger was given piglets to raise to ease her pain. The piglets were photographed wearing what appeared to be tiger skin coats. This hoax existed on two levels.

First the tiger and piglets were on display in a zoo in Thailand that frequently did stunts like this solely for the amusement and pleasure of its guests (the tiger skin coats were totally for show). The other level of this hoax took off when pictures hit the Internet in 2006.

The story about the mothers loss was fixed to the pictures and people charmed at the idea e-mailed it like wildfire. Of course, sites such as snopes.com have exposed this as a hoax.

Other hoaxes involve illiciting sympathy to bring awareness to an issue. For example a story about a mother, dying of cancer, and looking for years for her long lost children. In this story the womans two children had been taken from her and sent to live in foster homes when the woman had been an alcoholic.

Now sober she finally tracks them down and on the day she gets to be reunited with them tragedy strikes and they are run down by a drunk driver as they cross the street to meet her. Here the hoax was used to make people aware of the hazards of driving while drunk.

Generally specific information is not given, such as dates and locations, making it hard to verify if a hoax is true or not. Other times names and information are given in such a way to make a story more believable in the hopes that nobody will try to check it out.

April first is commonly called April fools day in some parts of the world, and is a common day for playing harmless pranks and trying to hoax other people.

A hoax may go all the way of becoming a scam, or a con, when requests for money are made, or if damage is done by a persons actions following what the hoax tells them to do. 

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