MSNBC has produced a list of the 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. The list doesn't appear to be in order.
Twitter/Facebook AMBER alert: people broadcasting fake alerts about missing children over Twitter and Facebook.
Bonsai Kitten: fake images of a kitten in a bottle, complete with instructions on how to make your own. The American Humane Society and the FBI investigated it.
Epilepsy Forum Raid: Hackers got into the websites of Epilepsy Foundation of America and the British National Society for Epilepsy, filling them with rapidly-flashing images. It has been blamed on Anonymous (best known for their anti-Scientology actions), 7chan, eBaum's world, and the Internet Hate Machine.
Bigfoot's body: Two men in Georgia, USA, claimed to have bigfoot in their freezer, and sold the corpse to a man from Indiana for $50,000.
Changing pi: Mark Boslough wrote an April Fools story in 1998 about how Alabama legislators were going to change the mathematical constant pi to 3.
Save Toby: In 2005, some people announced they had found an injured rabbit and restored it to health. The heartwarming story changed tack when they said they'd cook eat it unless people donated $50,000.
Myspace Suicide: 13 year old Megan Meier met a boy called Josh on MySpace. They exchanged emails and she fell in love with him. He broke it off a month later and she committed suicide, hanging herself in her bedroom on 16 October 2006. But Josh never existed: Lori Drew, the mother of a girl who knew Megan, created the fake profile and Drew and others used it to send Meier abusive messages.
419 Nigerian scams: The classic get-rich-quick scheme, where someone emails to say that they've got $100 million in an African bank account and with your help they can get it out. Just send some money to help. And your bank details... In 1995, an American who went to Lagos after one of these schemes was murdered.
Work-at-home scams: Another age-old trick: just send money and we'll tell you how to earn $$$ from your own home. Whether the method involves setting up your own work-from-home scam will vary.
Facebook hoax on TechCrunch: Facebook tricked technology news website TechCrunch into believing Facebook had added a "fax this photo" feature to every photo on Facebook.
(Via Museum of Hoaxes, who suggests they missed manbeef.com, Marry Our Daughter, and "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!")
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