An Elaborate Hoax
Do you like mysteries? Want to help solve one?
[UPDATE] The identity of the anonymous sender has been revealed! He trusted someone he shouldn’t have. Still deliberating on the best thing to do with this info.
A Very Strange Email
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an anonymous sender making some pretty outrageous claims about The Lost Dogs Home. He wrote that they had hired someone with slaughterhouse experience to be their new operations manager. The “evidence” provided was a LinkedIn profile that looked potentially fake.
A Very Strange Profile
Someone obviously spent a lot of time creating the profile but as was pointed out to me by a Linkedin user, it’s quite possibly a fake.
- it doesn’t link to The Lost Dogs’ Home’s real Linkedin profile.
- Anyone can say they worked anywhere on Linkedin!
Linkedin Is Not Reliable Evidence!
Anyone can say they work at LDH. It took me all of 2 minutes to update my profile to say I was a ‘Voice of Reason’ at LDH. It’s simply not credible evidence is it?
So What’s The Big Deal?
Truth is important! Serious claims like the ones sent to me should not be made (or accepted) without evidence. Ideally the authenticity of that evidence is available to be verified by anyone. That’s not possible with the Linkedin profile I was sent. Sometimes evidence consists of the testimonial of a trusted person. My anonymous emailer did not meet that criteria.
What’s Really Going On Here?
The person who sent me the original email was annoyed when I didn’t write about it. I don’t know why he was going to so much trouble to get me to spread the story. It was suggested that someone may be attempting to discredit some animal welfare advocates. There are now a small number of Facebook accounts who are spreading the Linkedin profile by posting it on other people’s walls (68 since Thursday).
This post is intended as a reminder that we should not believe everything we read on the Internet. We only serve to discredit ourselves when we succumb to intellectual laziness or worse yet, the arrogance of willful ignorance.