Baby food scam aims to catch people off-guard By Virginia Baldwin Hick St. Louis Post-Dispatch Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News   NATIONWIDE - Gary Shepard and his colleagues at American Technology Corp. in Maryland Heights thought they'd hit a gold mine: As the result of a lawsuit settlement, a baby food company was paying $500 for each child born between Jan. 1, 1980 and Dec. 31, 1996. All you had to do was mail a self-addressed stamped envelope, a copy of your child's birth certificate and Social Security number. Earlier this week Shepard and friends had forwarded the settlement address via e-mail to dozens of friends before someone stopped and asked, ``Is this for real?'' Well, of course not. Chalk it up to the latest wild e-mail rumor to whisk through the Internet. And this particular wild-goose chase appears to be on its second or third go-around. It stems from a real court settlement involving price fixing by infant formula companies. The suit was limited to 15 states, including Illinois but not Missouri. It involved much less cash -- closer to $5 a child -- and required proof of purchase of the affected brands. The deadline for that settlement is past. Months ago. Don't mail your baby's birth certificate to Minnesota on the outside chance you'll get some cash. In fact, Bill Wood, a postal inspector in St. Louis, urges you not to mail your baby's birth certificate or Social Security number to anyone in hopes of getting some cash. ``There's a lot of credulous, unsophisticated people who acted on this, with no other source of information'' than a forwarded e-mail, Wood said. ``This has become the new gossip-at-the-well sort of stuff.'' No mail fraud was involved in this case, Wood said. But it demonstrates the potential. Accomplished criminals could make a lot of quick money from people willing to send valid birth certificates, Social Security numbers and home addresses -- not to mention stamped envelopes -- to a blind address on such flimsy evidence of a payoff. The biggest flurry over the infant formula settlement occurred in December and January, when people tried to make the settlement's real deadline of Jan. 31. The formula companies involved in the suit, Abbott Laboratories Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. were ordered to pay $50 million to plaintiffs in 15 states. Two states' attorneys generaldecided to take their states' share in product for low-income families. The other 13 set up some system of identifying people who had purchased the formula and were due a refund. The companies hired a mail-processing firm to disburse the money, but when misinformation got out onto the Internet, the company was inundated with ineligible claims, Wood said. A call to the Infant Formula Settlement line Thursday got a recording saying that the deadline is past, and that ``many false claim forms, false deadlines and false rumors are being circulated and should be ignored. Because of many thousands of claims, we cannot verify the receipt of specific individual claims.'' Like rumors spread in more old-fashioned ways, the e-mail rumor got embellished along the way. The formula companies dropped off and Gerber Products Co., the babyfood maker, was added. Gerber was not party to the suit, but the company felt compelled to add a disclaimer to its home page. A spokesman for Gerber said inquiries to the company had died down since the statement was posted. But he wondered why people computer-savvy enough to forward e-mail couldn't find out the real story on the Internet before spreading false information further. Shepard and his friends thought of that. Their server -- or their Internet service provider's server -- was down, he said. So they tried some older technology, the telephone. As soon as they discovered the error, Shepard said, they flashed off more e-mail to alert their friends -- who, by then, may have forwarded the original to a couple dozen other friends. And so the rumor goes on. Visit PostNet, the World Wide Web site of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.