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Behind The "Work-At-Home" Street Spam Signs
Sabalon writes: "If you live almost anywhere in the U.S. then you have probably seen tons of the 'Make thousands working at home' signs tacked up almost everywhere. Cockeyed.com has an interesting story of one persons quest to uncover the source behind all this money just waiting to be made, the company behind it (or not behind it for legal reasons), and an oversaturated market." Spam, just another medium.
We get these in the UK.
"Earn £300 a day working from home! Part time or full time!"
I always think it's either telesales or some pyramid scheme. The latter seems more obvious.
Claric
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
I don't know about you,
But every time I see these I make sure to take them all down and through them in the trash.
I figure that if it's on public property and I'm a tax payer.
I have a right to remove them if I see fit.
Now if IBM got fined for the Love Peace Linux graffiti.
I wonder what these guys get.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Rob Cockerham, a very pleasant guy who is sort of everybody's favorite mad inventor in this area (midtown Sacramento) runs that page... At the risk of dooming him to eternal slashdottedness, I urge you all to spend a half hour poking around the site at his various experiments. I have been lucky enough to be present for the polarbear/ketchup-packet extermination, for instance, and saw his fake banana sculpture at the mall on many visits. What a nice fella.
I read the site a week ago. The end conclusion is that an MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) is behind all of this: Herbalife.
The other interesting part of the story is that just today, a group of VCs bought out Herbalife which floundered after its founder OD'ed.
Ashame that page two isn't google cached ...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
In New York, they don't have to do that kind of thing. The billboards are already like that.
Print up a bunch of stickers that read something along the lines of "This sign is from a Herbalife distributor", and label them all. After all, they put the signs up, they should be properly credited (and fined). Do it long enough, and the company gets associated with the signs. Once that happens, the municipality can (and likely will, under the pressure of pissed off citizens who now know who they are upset with) go after Herbalife. Just because they aren't directly responsible doesn't mean they have no legal culpability, especially when a whole city goes after you.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If a business has a 1-800 number, it costs them money each time you call right? it's like long distance in reverse right?
i'd be willing to get an extra phone line (different number) and have my computer call and listen to the message all day. i could have it call them over and over again.
eventually maybe they would be forced to shut it down because they owed the phone company too much money? just a crazy idea....
get your dirty sig off me, you filthy APE!
Those 30 days 3- pounds signs are due to a multi-level marketing company called herbalife - and the stuff they sell you (powdered nutrition and vitamins) is hardly worth what you pay for it.
And, they don't treat their employees very well.
That was one of the things I was considering (I write an email client) -- Is it worth deleting emails which claim to come from yahoo/hotmail, but don't contain yahoo/hotmail in the IP address of their last "received" header?
I wonder how much spam actually travels through their SMTP servers, and how much of it just lists hotmail as a "From" address?
It wouldn't surprise me if spammers actually opened yahpoo accounts just to send another bulkmail, but that would limit them to 3 per minute with yahoo advertising, so it would be easier for them to just send it via an open relay, and write "From bill.gates@msn.com" into the headers.
Oh well, back to keyword filtering. "US Code 601"? Delete!
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
About October 2000, someone was posting on "aus.jobs" newsgroup talking about being an "Email Processor". When I looked into it even further, it appeared to be a pyramid scheme, designed to have the higher levels dissove over time (turning into a trapezoid). Other than sending the initial email and finding between the lines of the response, I decided not to pursue the matter any further (I was looking for work at the time).
It started to actually take off over time. About the middle of 2001 there was stuff everywhere. However a lot of people realised that it was a scam.
It has not progressed to the same level as this story in the US. If anything it has started to die down recently.
Its scary how much this mirrors Scientology. You pay more and more each time to get deeper into the system, and it seems you get more and more useless crap the deeper you go and the more you pay.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
That's right, these goonies of herbalife/quixtar/amway are out in full force trying to sign up as many unwitting subjects as they can. Here's my personal story:
I started my own website, tigerslash.com, and in an effort to promote it I made my own bumpersticker and put it on my car. One day when I was getting gas, a "successful" looking "businessman" across from me asked about tigerslash.com. I told him what it was, briefly how I made it, and things like that. He then proceeded to ask me if I was willing to work on other internet projects, and I said "if I have the time, maybe."
Well, I thought I was going to make some extra bucks on the side for a little web design, and Mr. X made me think the same thing when he followed up with "I run a website and I need some extra help with some of it." Then he proceeded to give me his business card, and I gave him mine, and he said he'd call once he'd consulted his associates...
Well he did call, so I thought I was going to make some quick cash for a little web work. We set up a meeting for that thursday and when it came around, I was interested in seeing what needed to be done. Well, I show up at the office and he presents me with this flyer about Britt Worldwide and all this information about their web strategy and "e commerce infrastructure." This is when the bells started going off in my head.
Mr. X then proceeded to elaborate on the whole mission, online sale of products combined with multilevel marketing. It was called Quixtar, the next big thing, and it sounded like a great scheme... if you were an idiot. I didn't beleive one word of it. I sat through about 30 minutes of this and took the brochure politely and left.
When I got home, I went to the website and started shopping. Amazingly, everything was overpriced. I thought "how in the world would they get people to buy this?" The fact is, the only people who do are the ones coerced into joining, so that they earn "points" with their purchases. If you're at the top of the pyramid, this is great, but if you're the average Joe, all you're doing is paying their salaries and getting $5 a month in return (after spending hundreds on "great products.")
I did some more digging and low and behold Quixtar is nothing more than Amway with a new name. It's the same owners, same company, but they don't say a damn thing about it when you ask them face to face. What a scam.
Needless to say, I was pissed. This form of Spam had approached me with a technical need in my field of work, then proceeded to waste my personal time travelling to, meeting, and researching these people. All that effort to find out I had been recruited for Amway. That's the worst type of spam ever.
~ now you know
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
After hacking through the initial 'contact' page which goes to GREAT lengths to make sure you didn't enter a dummy email address or phone number (pattern matching, predicted strings, etc) I was sent to the following link [Distributor ID removed to make sure he can't profit from it] page. It's a server that they pay for (one way or another) to have a tracking link.
The result, for $39.95, you get sent to you 'free shipping' your Information Decision Package (Gee, sound familiar) that contains 'EVERYTHING' you need to know. (yeah right)
I also immediately began receiving emails to the single-register email address I setup. In 24 hours, I've received 4 messages so far.
My FAVORITE part is on their contact page . Throughout the whole site they tell you that you can't contact them before you order your $39.95 IDP, however on the contact page they have this to say:
Meaning, if your not stupid enough to pay $40 for something you know absolutely nothing about, your smarter than we are and you'll see what kind of financial idiots your looking at.How fun, how timely!
I'm just getting to this, so it's probably going to be buried in deep. If you get this far, I hope you enjoy the information!
Garth
I was at the American embassy a while ago and saw a sign posted warning americans not to attempt to set up MLM scams in Europe. I asked the visa officer about it, and he said the embassy was aware of a number of americans currently in prison for setting up amway or herbalife MLM scams.
When the fraud police see the posters going up, they track back the number and arrest the scammer. Locals are allowed to avoid prison time by cooperating fully in testifying against their recruiter. If the recruiter is a local, lather, rinse, repeat. At the top, they always catch an american or a russian, and throw them in prison.
Americans tend to be ex-military trailer trash types who did a tour on a NATO base, and think they can come back and scam the locals, since they discover the american market is completely saturated a million times over. The russians are mafia wannabes who add physical intimidation, threats, blackmail and other nasty things to increase ROI. Its the russians the police are after, since there are other crimes than just conspiracy and finacial fraud. But they prosecute the americans just as vigorously, because they tend to make full confessions and claim that since fraud is legal in the US, it must be legal here.
Ex-pat groups always get americans or brits trying to set up a new MLM network. But the ex-pat types tend to be intelligent enough to know it can't work, so the scammers move on.
But I still see posters around town. Stopping these scams even with good laws on the books is like playing whak-a-mole.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on