Just got this now, 16:40 today 14/07/11 on Al-Jazeera network.....Lord help us! NASA reports tsunami alert on the west African coast (gulf of guinea) following a quake offshore Malabo (equatorial guinea). 20 meter high tides reported heading towards the coast of Lagos, Lome and Accra.
Needless to say, sending out false reports such as this is not funny, and in fact caused a lot of panic for people. Expert meteorologists determined that there is no tsunami or earthquake, and that the message is a hoax.
I don't know a single person that actually likes getting a broadcast BBM, and to get ones that are clearly spam, hoaxes, or plain false information is even worse. Every couple of weeks new threads pop up in the forums from people who have received fake broadcast BBMs supposedly from RIM saying their BBM is about to be deactivated. These messages are simply not true, and pointless. Make sure before you spread a BBM to all your friends, you check the validity of it, and if you're tempted to send a broadcast BBM to all of your contacts, you may want to consider any implications arising if they forward it to their contacts, and they forward to theirs, and so on.
To discuss the recent Nigerian hoax message in the forums
Source: IQ4News
Reader comments
Nigerians victim of tsunami warning hoax broadcast via BBM
The truly sad part is that it has some basis in fact. There was flooding in the Lagos area from extreme rains within the last 2 weeks -- 8 hours of heavy downpour. I had friends bbm me about it & verified it from some news sources. And the backlash from the fake tsunami warning could just stop some of the personal donations to the flood victims.
Yemisi Ogunleye? Sounds familiar.
How is this even news worthy? People send out hoax broadcasts all the time, but I guess since it happen in Nigeria, it's worth making a big deal about it
DThe dumbest dumb person: Yemisi Ogunleye is to blame for this grossly misappropriated message... As can be seen it was curled from IQ4News..... What a pity the likes of her can post such rubbish on the internet.... Moreso I got this message and new it was false....funny thing is that I got it from a non-nigerian contact. Moreso the message wasn't a warning to Nigerians it was to west africa so what the heck was she saying by picking on just one country......very sad I must say and she make other people look bad.
Love CB so I wud say most of their curled news sud be vetted properly.
#Gbam
Spot on....
We have the same problem with broadcasting in Barbados. The problem is not really the person who starts it but the people to rebroadcast it without even trying to verify it. If anyone verified it before rebroadcasting, it would never get so far.
On the topic of disabling broadcasting, I believe that you should have a blacklist/whitelist so that you can enable broadcast for some people (some people broadcast sales of products and such, i don't mind those) and disable it for some people (stupid jokes and the same hoax-like messages, i have a friend who would rebroadcast anything). But I think that they should at least put the broadcast from the disabled contacts in bbm updates or something so that you review the broadcasts in case the person/people actually broadcast something of worth.
Or even have a broadcast stream similar to the updates, without alerts with integrated into social feeds.
It doesn't say. Why are you accusing CB of that? It just says they were targeted....never sent by one. You're making CB look bad with false accusations.
I'm a proud Nigerian & I feel this post is bad press for my country. What evidence do you have to back up the fact that this hoax message was broadcast by a Nigerian??? Y'all making us look bad!
I'm truly sorry that this makes your country look bad, but if you go almost anywhere in the world, their are plenty of your fellow countrymen that are giving your country an awful name. I've personally been drugged and had my credit card numbers stolen by Nigerian crime rings in Tokyo. This isn't an isolated incident either as they target foreigners there and that's what got me out of it. You even have a bad rep with the other African nations. I'm sure that their are plenty of fine upstanding Nigerians, but the many bad apples out there are ruining it for those people.
May be they should have used the Disaster Alert app from the CrackBerry store: http://software.crackberry.com/product.asp?id=48746&n=DisasterAlert-Mont...
:)
So....its ok for the Nigerians to scam Americans out of money daily with hacking and email scams...but were not supposed to eff wit them??
Omo naija here - if you are dumb enough to believe some story about a Nigerian prince who wants to share millions with you if only you send him some small amount for his lawyer/bank fees/whatever, then you deserve to be scammed.
Like Nigerians didn't learn it from professional fraudsters in America....
Shio
Shio!!!!!
Baba carry go
LOL....and if your dumb enough to believe a fake broadcast message about a tsunami, from NASA (why would they effing send it over BBM!?!), you deserve to be a dumb Nigerian retard running around freaking the eff out...
Guess that door swings both ways...retards here, and in Nigeria...BAM! Cookie!
LOL....and if your dumb enough to believe a fake broadcast message about a tsunami, from NASA (why would they effing send it over BBM!?!), you deserve to be a dumb Nigerian retard running around freaking the eff out...
Guess that door swings both ways...retards here, and in Nigeria...BAM! Cookie!
LOL....and if your dumb enough to believe a fake broadcast message about a tsunami, from NASA (why would they effing send it over BBM!?!), you deserve to be a dumb Nigerian retard running around freaking the eff out...
Guess that door swings both ways...retards here, and in Nigeria...BAM! Cookie!
thankfully i never get these hoaxes, I use a flashed metropcs berry.
haha
I don't think disabling the broadcast feature is the answer....even tho the feature is misused it is still a very good tool for "broadcasting" information.....just some idiots are bored!!!
The guys at IQ4News are either suffering from Nigeriaphobia or just plain idiots. I've heard a lot of bad stuffs about Nigerians but to my surprise, i know several who are just plain admirable, responsible, and successful, far more than i can say for most other people that i know. For one thing, as with most other cases, we've been presented with another story without any evidence whatsoever to justify their claim! Have we come to a point where, for any odd stuff out their that we cant explain, the easiest thing to do is to accuse someone else? I read the entire article and could not find anywhere where an evidence was established.
Bless you....
The bottom line is, the writer of the original story (Yemisi Ogunleye) is very dumb. The people who believe it are in the same dumb boat with her.
It's no different then crazy analysts and media reports that say that RIM is dead, and they are going to be under water by the end of the year.
Good thing for the RIMpire. He set things straight. He is going to say nothing but good things about RIM from this day forward.
Thanks RIMpire !
??????
................
These hoaxes can grow exponentially to become a denial of service attack. I suspect the extra traffic from this one may have caused the delays and outages seen on BBM today.
It's OK. I got this covered. I'll pay for all the damage from the tsunami with my newly discovered inheritance...and the lottery I won just last week.
I just hope Mr. Smith escaped the wrath of the ocean. He's my lawyer in Nigeria.
Maybe RIM can set up a confirmation service. take it a bit farther perhaps they can set up a true warning service, Integration of bbm, rss feeds and other news services with a warning service app managed by RIM. It could be a goodwill service and clearly required,
RIM acknowledged that disabling broadcasts is one of the top requested features for BBM in the Beta Zone forums, yet as usual they couldn't care less. Sure would save a lot of headache in cases like this, since hoaxes like this wouldn't reach as many people so easily.
They have it all wrong..Kansas is under the Tsunami warning..
The worst part of this hoax is that one day it could be real but people will ignore the warning thinking it's just another hoax :(
Spotted this as well. lol
http://thenationonlineng.net/web2/articles/48736/1/Expert-warns-of-tsuna...
I hope nobody was hurt because of this
Whether true or false, broadcast messages suck.