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  • 2006-05-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Ashley Flores (en)
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  • Most missing child alerts circulated via email fall into one of two categories: genuine reports of missing children that continue to be forwarded long after the child has been found, or hoaxes imploring readers to look for children who aren't missing or don't exist. This message bore all the hallmarks of the latter category: In October 2008, we encountered a version of the email that had been translated into French and which positioned the missing girl as having been taken from the Montreal area. The text of the e-mail (reproduced as we first received it in May 2006) did not include some of the most basic information one would expect to find in a genuine missing child plea: where the young girl (Ashley Flores) went missing, when she went missing, when and where she was last seen, a physical description of her, contact information for her parents, contact information for the local police authorities handling the case, etc. All that was provided was the ambiguous statement that a Deli manager from Philadelphia, Pa had a 13-year-old daughter who had been missing for two weeks, and even that information seemed to have been tacked on to the message by someone other than its originator. It even included phrases taken word-for-word from previous missing child hoax emails, such as Christopher John Mineo and Kelsey Brooke Jones. Meanwhile, the one piece of identifying information provided in the message, a yahoo.com email address, produced a no such user error when mail was sent to it; and a variety of searches through news accounts and law enforcement and missing child web sites, including the site of the Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), failed to turn up any mention of a missing girl named Ashley Flores. In the event, it turned out that although the pictured Ashley Flores might have been a real girl, her missing status was one concocted as a kids' prank. In this case it was a particularly bad and widespread prank, one that left thousands and thousands of concerned citizens attempting to verify the status of a missing girl who wasn't really missing, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer: In one day alone (19 May 2006), our site registered over 25,000 searches from readers looking for information about Ashley Flores. In April 2007, a version appearing over the signature of Staff Sergeant Rick Williams of the Rolla (Missouri) Police Department began hitting inboxes. While there is indeed a staff sergeant named Rick Williams working for that particular law enforcement agency, the hoax is just as much a hoax as ever. Says the Rolla Police Department about the email: In October 2009 the Rolla Police Department announced it had changed its phone number because of the false alert. Police Chief Mark Kearse said the department had been experiencing significant issues for the past two years because of the false Amber Alert for Ashley Flores. As of March 2011, nearly five years after the original missing Ashley Flores message was first set loose on the Internet, the hoax was still going strong, with this article remaining one of the most searched-for articles on our site. (en)
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