Your inbox may contain a message that claims: "Emails with pictures of Gordon Brown actually smiling are being sent and the moment that you open these emails your computer will crash and you will not be able to fix it!"
"SEND THIS E-MAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW"
Yes, obviously, it's a hoax, so please don't pass it on.
The same email also throws in a free bonus: it warns against "a virus that opens an Olympic Torch which 'burns' the whole hard disc C of your computer."
Graham Cluley of the Sophos anti-virus company speculates in a blog post (Can Gordon Brown's smile infect your computer with a virus?) that "the Gordon Brown virus hoax was started by someone as a joke, taking the mickey out of the notoriously dour Prime Minister". But since Brown's YouTube smile was in the news more than nine months ago, it seems to have taken the joker a long time to give birth to something so feeble.
Several sites keep track of these fake emails including Snopes, Hoax-slayer, and Urban Legends. It's always better to spend a few seconds checking that an email is a hoax, though the chances of this sort of thing being genuine could be on a par with winning the lottery.
