Over past few days, a bunch of my BBM contacts have been asking me if the following BBM Broadcast is true:

“This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list in order to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts.”

The simple answer is the message is FALSE. There are other variations of this message including one which was circulating yesterday when there was an issue with BBM profile pics. These types of hoaxes have been circulating around BBM for a while now in several different languages. The only way to stop them is to be aware that they are only hoaxes and to be afraid that you may look foolish if you forward/broadcast them.

I’ve gotten the same type of messages where these hoaxsters have written ‘Blackberry’ and even ‘blackberry’. One of the hoaxes in the past said to visit www.blackberry.com/inactiveusers for more info. Many people didn’t even think to click the link and visit the non-existent webpage before re-broadcasting the message. Beyond that, the messages are always poorly written. Furthermore, to think that RIM would message millions of users, telling them to simultaneously BBM all of their contacts over RIM’s servers which are already at capacity “really full,” is… Forget it. I digress.

Here’s an actual word from RIM, which was posted in the support forums by a BlackBerry Technical Advisor back in April when these hoaxes were heavily circulating>>

“A hoax message circulating on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) asks users to forward on the BBM message to their contacts in order to maintain BBM service, and claims to have been originally sent by Research In Motion (RIM).

Rest assured that this BBM message did not originate from RIM and that it does not impact the security of BlackBerry smartphones. It is simply a hoax chain message. Unfortunately, many social networking applications face this scenario, whereby any message, including a hoax message, can be forwarded to a user from one of their contacts. We recommend that users simply ignore the message and do not forward it.”

These BBM server broadcasts aren’t the only hoax chains that circulate around BBM. I’ve also seen several false Amber Alerts and other such things. If you’re ever questioning the validity of any type of chain message on BBM, or any other form of messaging or social networking for that matter, Google it before you forward it.

[Via: BlackBerry Support Forums]