Subject: Warning this is for real don’t take KEYRING from gas attendant
This happened yesterday to André:
He went to fill his vehicle, and the gas station attendant handed him a free key holder. When he arrived at work, he noticed something strange about the key holder. A little copper plate was noticeable.
A sticker was on the key holder, and when he removed the sticker, a type of sim card was visible. He broke the key holder open, and inside was a small tracker working with sun power. He took it to the police, who told him that they know all about it. The criminals hand them out, follow you home and then hit. PLEASE BE EXTRA CAREFUL. BE SAFE.
My son got one of these over the weekend. After this e-mail he stripped it and found it equipped with solar panel, antenna the works!
Attached a couple of cell phone pictures.
OK, this is an old one. And it’s pretty dumb. And in this case I’d actually let the students talk about how dumb it is, but let’s do the checks first.
Ask the students what the search terms should be. Maybe even ask what the problem with searching for just |gas station key-ring| would be. Obviously, you’re just going to get a lot of key ring results, right? Get to a search like |gas station key-ring tracking device|. It will look like this:
Search results
And stop there. Can the students get a pretty good idea of the likely status of this claim from the results? Yeah? Ask them what they see. It should be pretty clear that things are not looking good for this claim.
Here’s another thing to notice. Look at the dates. What do the students see here?
Yeah, in this case this claim is a bit of zombie scarelore. It’s been around forever but keeps resurfacing, year after year.
A lot of times I steer away from the question of whether something makes sense or not, but in cases that have conspiracy overtones, I will sometimes dive in. Because there is a sort of weird dream logic to conspiracy stories that makes a sort of sense but evaporates the more you look at it. And as long as you do the checks first, it’s worth digging in a bit.
Because think about this dastardly plan — a gas station attendant gives you a key ring, presumably to track you back to your home, which I guess is where they “get” you? But why? If you wanted to rob a rich house, would you give a person a keychain, track them to their home, stake out a house, wait for them to leave and then rob the house? Or would you go to a rich neighborhood and find a house where no one is home? Seems a bit simpler, right?
A lot of conspiracy that you’ll see is obsessed with people being tracked to their homes. And it’s certainly the case that some people are stalked (though frankly more often by people the person knows). But in conspiracy world there are always random evil-doers that somehow spot you (yes, you!) in a crowd and then pull Keifer Sutherland 24-level stunts to track you to your home and kidnap you or rob you. In this world, most crimes are not crimes of opportunity, but crimes where you are picked out as a victim, sometimes days before a crime, and then through a lengthy convoluted process a criminal waits for an opportunity, or devises one.
I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s a warped vision of what most criminal threats look like. And it’s like a lot of conspiracy theory, where the person believing it sees themselves as a character at the center of a plot, facing many invisible threats, that are external and targeted. It reminds me a bit of the whole “GirlLover” toy logo panic of 2016, a bit of pre-QAnon sex-trafficking panic where a mother believed that a logo on a toy was marking her kid as available for sex-trading by pedophiles. In reality, of course, children are not in danger from secret sex pedophile rings using subtle signalling protocols. To the extent they are in danger of molestation or death they are in danger of that by relatives or family friends, not strangers. And one of the biggest paths to actual sex-trafficking in the U.S. is the rejection of gay and trans youth, who find themselves living on the street after being thrown out of their homes for who they are. But that’s far more uncomfortable for people to reckon with than imagining secret pedophile societies engaging in child abductions. The proto-QAnon and QAnon vision is a vision of evil that is distressing, but also comforting in its delineation of of villains.
I’d mention one other interesting thing about this particular piece of scarelore. While many myths of this sort have no clear origin, this one actually does have a begin date. It appears to have come out of a particular promotion in South Africa. As Snopes notes:
In this case we don’t need to engage in any skeptical speculation, though, because we know the origins of this rumor. It began with the free distribution of completely innocuous, (light-activated) flashing key rings at gas stations in South Africa as a promotional device for gasoline retailer Caltex (a brand name of the Chevron Corporation), and the claims of criminal activity associated with those key rings are completely false.
Since then, of course, it’s been recycled many times. But it’s interesting to think about this as potentially a rumor that initially formed from real confusion, but has subsequently been recycled year after year in country after country because it proved so effective.
