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Don't Click Here For A Free iPod
fermion writes "Do you wonder what all those free iPods links are about? Do you wonder why apparently rational Slashdot users would use their .sig line to push an offer that seems little more than a thinly veiled pyramid scheme? Answers to these questions can be found in this NYT article (personal information, with no free iPod, is required). The plan itself seems simple. Rat out your friends to advertisers, and get a free gadget. The firm in question, Gratis, Inc, gets a bounty on each customer. The firm claims to have a revenue of $15 million in 2004. They claim to give away 500 iPods a week. If, as the article claims, each contact earns a bounty of around $50, we might presume that 1 in 12 contacts get a free iPod. This firm seem fairly upfront. Another firm mentioned in the article, Consumer Research Corporation, seems much less so. As always, read the fine print."
freeipods.com has been talked about before. There was even an article on wired about it a while back; http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64614,00.html From everything I have read, it seems legit as far as people getting their ipods.
Know what "exponential growth" means? ;)
It's that it's a nasty scheme to harvest contacts for junk mail, telemarketing, etc.
The company I work for partners with a lot of these companies, offering one of the things you can sign up for as part of your work toward a free whatever. The companies we work with are legit, but the idiots that sign up for this shit don't read the agreement details and then they wind up getting deluged with legally clear spam, junk mail, and telemarketing.
It's not really free, it's just that you don't pay for what you get with cash. You pay for it with your time. You have to sift through legit spam, junk mailers, hassle with telemarketers who can now legally call you even if you're on the DNC list.
So, hey, if you sign up and didn't read the agreement, too bad. You're an idiot, and you deserve all the crap that you get deluged with. Hope all that extra advertising was worth the free iPod.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
No drop-of-blood-required link here generated via this generator
Basically you're hoping to screw five suckers who will probably never get a free iPod (or whatever) before the whole idiotic mess collapses. Not very nice.
Among the things I read:
1) The company isn't responsible if you're not ellegible for the free ipod list.
2) The company doesn't guarantee that if you're ellegible, it will send you the free ipod.
3) The company doesn't guarantee that when they send it, it will arrive.
In other words, the company doesn't guarantee A THING.
It's a scam. Just a SPAM frontend.
While I don't know the validity of this particular offer just beware that the only losers are the guys on the bottom row. Just make sure that isn't you.
And that ain't gonna happen. Sooner or later you will end up in the bottom row. Why?
Because your success depends on the pyramid growing. And the pyramid CAN'T GROW FOREVER. At an geometric growth rate, it requires less than 30 generations to reach the world population. It's like a 30 bit number, but this time bits are base 10 or 12.
This means that sooner or later, the pyramid will experience the so-called "bubble effect". Soon the ones at the bottom will stop generating revenue for you, and this means you'll stop generating revenue for the ones above you, and the pyramid collapses (meaning that the base will always disappear). Then the pyramid becomes VERY narrow and it's like it's started again.
These pyramid schemes are always fraudulent because they promise you an impossible success. It's impossible because the base growth can't be maintained. It happened with Amway, Scientology, and major bible cults. In the end, the base always suffers the worst consequences. And if you were at the base, you'll be again.
The fraud in this case is that you don't get the free ipod INSTANTLY. You need to prove your worth. And that means submitting LOTS of e-mails to spammers. And those aren't even IN the pyramid. They're above it.
And don't tell me that the ad isn't deceptive. Hiding the nasty details in fine print, ON PURPOSE, is one of the greatest frauds in marketing.
In general, the pyramid scheme is evil, because your earnings depend on how many people you abuse or cause to be abused .
"Why do people bother asking me why I have this in my sig?"
Not to worry. I won't. Ever.
Slashdot -> Preferences -> Comments -> Disable Sigs
Now if I could only get rid of the excessive whitespace from the HTML-Formatted-But-Don't-Preview crowd, I won't have anything to complain about.
Don't worry there's a hard limit to how long this can last. Lets say it takes 1 month to get the 5 referrals you seem to need (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to account for people taking longer, dropping out etc):
Start: 1 person.
1 Month: 5 new (6 total)
2 Months: 25 new (31 total)
3 Months: 125 new (156 total)
4 Months: 625 new (781 total)
5 Months: 3125 new (3906 total)
6 Months: 15625 new (19531 total)
7 Months: 78125 new (97656 total)
8 Months: 390625 new (488281 total)
9 Months: 1953125 new (2441406 total)
10 Months: 9765625 new (12207031 total)
11 Months: 48828125 new (61035156 total)
12 Months: 244140625 new (305175781 total)
13 Months: 1220703125 new (1525878906 total)
14 Months: 6103515625 new (7629394531 total)
Since there are only 6,446,131,400 people in the world the scheme cannot continue longer than 14 months. Sadly, those last few months will suck big time (and a few months after because of people who can't do basic math).
If you don't like what you see in signatures, turn signatures off in your Slashdot settings.
I'll second that; I turned off sigs years ago. Further, there is already a system in place to mark when a person is an ass-stick: foe them. Moderating individual articles for some unseen sig offense will likely have me hitting the Unfair radio button as well.
Sorry pal, but you are wrong. Try filling in only the username, password, and email fields, and watch the following appear:
There is a problem highlighted in red below. For help, click here.
# Please enter a GENDER.
# Please enter a BIRTH YEAR.
# Please enter a ZIP CODE.
# Please select an INCOME RANGE.
# Please select an INDUSTRY.
# Please select a JOB TITLE.
# Please select a JOB FUNCTION.
# Please select a NEWSPAPER USAGE.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Yep! When I first heard about the Gratis, Inc. offer to send a free iPod, I figured "Hey, I'll at least give it a try and see exactly what they're really asking me to do."
I got through the majority of the thing before I realized it was going to be a huge waste of my time to proceed further. At the beginning, they don't really make it clear that you need to get at least 5 referrals to *sign up for the offers they're emailed* (and I believe, keep them for at least 30 days, too). They make you think that YOU simply have to do so with one (of many) offers you click through, and then give them 5 valid email addresses of friends.
From my browsing through all the "trial offers", I began to realize that almost all are a royal pain in the butt to get cancelled after you sign up. I might be willing to go through the hassle myself, but I sure don't want to make 5 of my friends do so (if I could even get 5 of them to sign up for these offers in the first place!).
I think one of the "simplest" ones to cancel was the offer to sign up with AOL, and as most of us probably already know - that's not usually the easiest thing in the world to cancel. (At the very least, you're gonna be waiting on hold for 20 or 30 minutes until you talk to some cust. service clown who keeps trying to give you more "free hours" rather than just cancel you.)
Worse yet, so many other people already know about these deals, you end up emailing friends who are already trying to get the free iPod themselves.
I seriously got mine from freeipods.com. I documented the entire thing (play by play) on my blog:
:-D ).
Free iPod Posts
That query will display just my free iPod posts. I posted as quick as I can, so the dates are very accurate to the actual events. Even a few photos posted at the end.
I did sign up for a freeflatscreen, though haven't completed the requirements for that one (if you want to see blog posts for free flat screens... help out
All I can say is: I got mine. I have no idea about everyone else who participated, but mine came to my door. So for me, it worked.
Just my $0.02
Word of caution: be careful about signing up for credit cards and cancelling them. The number of credit cards you own and have ever owned make up a part of your credit rating. Two credit cards you sign up for and cancel probably aren't going to do much... But if you go to get a mortgage and you've had 20 different cards, it could raise some eyebrows.
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!
physical property = time * effort + material
This makes the material bit kinda irrelevant to the entire equation, and thefefore can be ignored for the purposes of the grandfather post.
Let's do the math. I'm not going to double check the figures, but I believe you refer 5 people, and once they all sign up, you get a free iPod. Rinse and repeat.
Okay, so one person hooks up five people, they all sign up (making the company $50 * 6 = $300) and a $249 iPod is sent out to the first guy. Profit so far is $51.
Each of those five hooks up five people for a total of 25 new people, so 25 * 50 = 1250. Five iPods = 1245, not much profit this time.. so this shows that at $50 there's no real profit for the company at each generation, until...
25 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 = 2.5 billion.
At this point you've exhausted everyone on the Internet, as you can't sign up more than once. So where's the money?
As in ANY pyramid scheme, the money is in the last generation of the scheme! Free iPods will reach a point where they have several million on their books, and those several million can't find anyone to sign up! So.. several million * 50 = $A LOT OF PROFIT. And those guys won't get an iPod. Cha-ching.
A friend of mine made the mistake of signing up to AOL with his debit card. I watched him at work make dozens of phone calls to try and get AOL to stop billing him. Eventually he got frustrated enough he went to his bank and threatened to close his account if they didn't stop it.
I think he did eventually get AOL to cancel - but the moral is, if you must sign up to AOL, use a credit card rather than a debit card. (Generally, it's also less hassle to cancel a credit card rather than close your bank account and change billing/direct debit instructions for all your bills to a new account)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Yes, of course they're making money off of this. It doesn't take a slashnot story to figure that one out. We're not exactly talking about breaking news here. And even so, do you really have a problem with that? I don't. And yes, they ask for personal information, but do you actually give it to them? I gave them an email address I can shut down at a moments notice. I gave them a creditcard that can't be used again. I don't mind giving out a physical address simply becasue these guys aren't interested in sending out real mail-- That costs money. It's not the MO of a spammer anyway.
Honestly, this story is a little lopsided in nature. Call me biased (see sig for details), but you don't have to play by their rules. I mean, God forbid you use that concept in say, a free email account? Not that they don't attempt to make cash off you either. Or how about slashdot adverts and the story self promotions you see occationally?*
Seriously, you play this game every day on the internet. Nothing changed just because it's a free ipod or because Slashdot all of a sudden became aware of it.
* No, I honestly don't care. Unlike some people I've accepted it as something that goes with the territory.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I used to work for the company that owns freeflixtix.com, evivaclub.com, & tenspot.com - the premise was simple. Sign up, refer 5 friends, and get free movie tickets.
All of the information was happily sold off to "3rd party marketing partners" and the list (over 7 million people when I left) was also used for the company's spamming arm, Moxio (or Bonus Bonez, whatever they're calling it now) - you and your referrals all got the spam. Lots of it. If you cancelled your freeflixtix.com account, your referrals (and usually you) still got tons of spam. Your address (email, phone number, AND mailing address) was sold off already.
Yes, people eventually did get some free tickets after jumping through "partner" hoops..some requiring you to keep the "trial" for 2 weeks or more, or to give up MORE personal info & credit card numbers.
It's worse than the "freecreditreport.com" scam that requires you to sign up for Equifax's "Credit Monitoring Service" and more spam.
Is there any way that Slashdot can simply dump any post that has that ponzi scheme as a sig?