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Bogus wish runs amok Mail Tribune / Bob Pennell Along with a lot of other people, Pronto Print owner Arnie Klott still gets e-mails asking him to send business cards to a dying kid who is collecting as many as he can to get into the record books. Klott fell for it at first but soon learned the e-mail is a hoax. The Make A Wish Foundation still gets truckloads of business cards from thousands of other well-meaning people who have fallen victim to the now 11-year-old chain-letter myth. Thousands fall for old chain letter on Internet By Mark Freeman When Leticia George received the letter detailing how 7-year-old Craig Shelford was trying to set a record for collecting the most business cards before he died from a brain tumor, she dutifully complied. George mailed in a Medford Jet Center business card to the Make A Wish Foundation address on the letter last week. She also then followed the letter�s other request by sending copies of it to 20 more Jackson County businesses encouraging them to do the same. "We only have one business card," George said, "but we thought it would be good to help this kid out." George could have helped more simply by throwing the letter in the trash. Little Craig isn�t so little � he�s a 20-something college student now � and he no longer is dying. Unfortunately, neither is his story, and the Make a Wish Foundation has one wish for George and the hundreds of people who get these and other bogus chain letters daily � just stop it, already. The Help Craig Shelford chain letter now circulating through the Rogue Valley is the latest and bogus version of an 11-year-old headache that just won�t die for the foundation whose job is to grant wishes for seriously ill kids. There is no Craig Shelford trying to collect business cards, and the Make a Wish Foundation is not, nor ever was, involved with him. The foundation devotes a page on its Web site to dispelling the Craig chain-letter myth, mails out thousands of form letters each week to people who inquire about him. They even run a hotline � 800-215-1333 � to handle all the let�s-help-Craig requests. But good-natured people like George continue to ship business cards by the thousands to Craig in Georgia, and foundation leaders can�t get rid of this albatross. "I myself probably answer a couple hundred e-mails a week about it, but they just keep coming," said Jodi Walls, a spokeswoman at the foundation�s national office in Phoenix, Ariz. "We don�t know exactly how it started," Walls said. "But it�s out there, and there�s nothing we can do." Like all good pieces of fiction, this one is at least rooted in fact. There really was a Craig � Craig Shergold, actually � who in 1989 was a 9-year-old boy trying to collect enough greeting cards to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. With the help of a different wish foundation, Craig received more than 16 million cards and his wish was granted in 1990. About that time, Medford printer Arnie Klott recalls getting a chain letter asking to help Craig with his business card collection. So Klott sent several thousand extra ones from his shop. "A year later, it came up again, and I thought, gosh, he ought to be in the record book or dead by now," said Klott, who sent some more cards. Since then, Klott gets the chain letter "two or three times a year," most recently last month. "It�s better than the poop-on-the-lawn chain letter," Klott said. "But I didn�t send it to anybody." The current scoop on the real Craig, by the way, is that he is a healthy college student and has asked that the mailings stop. But they don�t. Sometimes the story changes, but it never stops. "It�s like that game you play as a kid, where you whisper into someone�s ear and tell them to pass what you say on down the line and see how the information changes," Walls said. "The last name always changes, and the age. But it�s always Craig, though." And the business cards sent to the foundation always go to the same place � an Atlanta-area recycling center. By the boxes. In fact, it has so permeated the foundation�s day-to-day business that people like Walls dislike investing any time in explaining it over the telephone. "Every minute we spend responding to these is less time we have to do what we do," Walls said. "Hopefully, it will stop." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.