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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."
I want you all to read this very carefully: Nothing is free , except true charity and this is decidedly not charity. Somebody (Gratis Inc.) is making money. Let me tell you a secret.....your identity and demographic information is valuable. Individually, it means very little, but when you sell out your friends to get in on this scheme, numbers start adding up and marketing firms and companies are paying big for this information, thus the 500 iPods/week adding up to $6.5 Million US/year and the company is decidedly making a tidy profit on top of this expenditure.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It seems common sense [to me anyway] that to get a "free" iPod from some company or person that is giving one away, they stand to gain something in return. Since I don't know precisely what they are gaining, since it isn't money from me, and I have to assume they aren't doing it in the Christmas Spirit and giving for the sheer joy of it, then it only stands to reason that they are going to loot me in some way.
Some people might not mind having their personal browsing or comsumer habits monitored at every turn or click, but I'd rather keep some anonymity. Especially from companies which are quite obviously associated with spamming, and pyramid scheming.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I can easily see this thread degenerating in to hundreds of 'rational' slahdotters begging for refs. We'll see...
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
Do you wonder what all those free iPods links are about?
No, not really.
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.
I know several people who got free iPods by signing up for the offers involved and then cancelling. If they paid anything at all, it was certainly a lot less than the cost of the iPod.
I guess if this company is making money, then not everyone bothers to get out of the offers they sign up for, but even they aren't getting ripped off.
BTW, there have been a few sites that set up referal pools, where people basically just got together and refered each other with the people in the pool.
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!
...is to get hired to work in one of Apple's retail stores! All permanent (i.e. not seasonal) employees get their very own iPod for "business" uses -- ostensibly, this is to help familiarize the Mac Specialists with the product, and also to give you a "reference" to look up data (stored as notes in the iPod). But you're completely free to store your own music on there and use it for your own purposes, too.
(I suppose this might be too much "work" for some people, though, plus it doesn't have the fun of selling out your friends to spammers...)
Disclaimer: No links to sites will be given, so people don't think I'm spamming referrals. I don't plan to do any referral-based offers in the future anyway. Additionally, I'm not affiliated with any of these sites.
So far, I've received:
$170 check from a free green xbox offer (now closed)
Xbox, from another free xbox offer. (Anyfreegift)
ipod, from freeipods.com
$700 check, from freelaptops4you.
Only freeipods.com required referrals. The other grand worth of money/stuff didn't. I'm currently working on a deal for a laptop from another site.
Are some of the sites scams? Yeah. But some of them are legit, or close enough for you to get your stuff.
No drop-of-blood-required link here generated via this generator
You may have won 1,000,000 dollars.
sound familiar?
-haffi
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.
I am currently listening to the iPod mini i got from the freeipods site. I signed up in late july for one of the AOL offers. The link spent a couple weeks in my AIM profile and I had the five referrals by early august. My order was confirmed on Aug 11 and I had it in my hand by mid October (due to the ipod mini shortages). I canceled the AOL for broadband in a 5min phone call. To date I have not recieved any phone or snail mail spam directly related, and it was a throwaway email address.
Will it work for absolutely everyone?
-No
Will everyone who signs up get a free ipod?
-Probably not
Did I get a free ipod for less than an hours worth of work?
-Yup
Its not a scam. They make money AND give out "free" ipods.
I swear, those people with the free iPod links will be FIRST up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Say what you want, but Free XXX is always good. Unless you're... well, you know...
There's a math formula (which I can't remember) that you can use for any given pyramid scheme. The people who get in the earliest end up making all the gains. Eventually, the potential market is saturated, interest dies out, and the peopole who got in late end up "paying" for the earlier peoples cool stuff while getting nothing for themselves.
The mechanism works the same as supermarket discount cards. All those club member savings come from somewhere. They come from me. I implicitly pay for part of other people's groceries just because I don't want to sell my identity. Just like pyramid schemes, eventually everyone else will have the card, and they'll have to artificially inflate prices to give the illusion of savings. Once it's said and done, all the legitimate savings stop happening because everyone has the card and there's no one left to exploit. I suppose you could argue that reading ads from the mail makes money for them, so I guess that might count as a legitimate source of savings on your card.
But either way, those who got in early saved the most since the savings die out eventually. Somewhere along the way we all will have managed to trick ourselves into selling our identity for savings we aren't even making anymore.
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.
Here is a site I found that has a calculator that suggest how much the bits of information about you are "worth".
They suggest you "refer" agencies which collect information about you to this site so you are properly compensated.
Do you wonder why apparently rational Slashdot users ....
What slashdot have you been reading, exactly?
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
My friend came to me back in the summer, asking me to sign up under him at freeipods.com. At this point there wasn't much information about Gratis' operation on the Internet, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how the hell these guys could make money by giving away iPods.
I ended up posting my results here. Quick summary: It's economically viable. I wish I had thought of this first.
Moderations are for the content of the posting, not the signatures. If you don't like what you see in signatures, turn signatures off in your Slashdot settings.
Just for you I have a new sig!
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"If enough people start using bugmenot, these bastards just might stop requiring us to give them our life history to access a bit of information."
NYT doesn't require anything, just a unique email address, doesn't even have to be valid. Settle down.
"Derp de derp."
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
If everyone who wants to sign up is placed on the list, then there will be a point in time that there is no one else willing to sign up, therefore no one can be refered, and therefore no one at the bottom of the list gets anything (but spam). Why do you think your last 8-9 posts that have been praising their offers haven't inticed anyone? It's because if they were actually intrested in it, they would have clicked on one of the last 10 emails they got with the same offer. I've even seen people give an additional bonus, such as a gmail invite, to people who sign up. There's no one really willing to do just for the free(insertitem) anymore.
Besides, some people actually value their personal information over a free(insertitem).
By the way, the free(insertitem) offers are not pyramid schemes. They are matrix scheme varients. However, it doesn't make them any more reliable.
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.
So what you're saying is, if two people for some reason fall under the scrutiny of Gratis and are denied their ipods (who knows the real reason why, that's not the point) while hundreds of others have in fact recieved their product, it's still a scam? Right. For all you know your "mysteriously denied" friend could have broken the rules or whatever.
Also, I signed up for freeipods with my gmail address. The only spam I get is dictionary-type attacks, and i hardly think those would be necessary if my addy had supposedly been sold by Gratis. If you sign up for an offer and THAT company sells your info, that's your own lookout. Gratis does not, as best I can tell.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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
Back in the day, before I went on to better, more mature things, I ran some porn sites. To get traffic, I sent about 100 spams every day by hand to usenet groups using AOL. The spams said they were giving a pirated login/password to a porn site link that was included.
Of course, the web-form that opened was bogus, people could have typed in anything and gotten to the porn. But, thinking it was a stolen password, people jumped on it. I was making 3000 or so a month at the peak, all from the same 100 or so daily usenet spams. For some reason, (maybe guilt?) people who used the "free" password were much much more likely to click on the legit banners in my site.
Eventuanlly, after the the banner affiliate programs got complaints from the usenet police (a singularly dedicated band of activists that have way too much time on their hands) about me, I stopped getting paid. Sluggish AOL even noticed their complaints, and my accounts kept getting turned off. By then I was making much more money at a real job, but the experience a very valuable look at the dark side of net and human psychology.
It would be really interesting to look at how many of these slashdotters posting about how they got a "free iPod" somehow all set-up their accounts in the last couple of hours or so ... Also, those folks with sigs linking to the iPod offer will also have realized the potential this story offers.
FreeDryerLint.info
I created this site to put in my sig on various sites after getting annoyed by all the freeipod referal links)
I have blog like everyone else
Right, and they don't validate any of it. They don't even have you click a link after you've recieved an email from them to activate the account.
You don't have to give them info. Put garbage in the blanks, then sit down and shut up. I'm tired of you self-righteous loud-mouths with your campaign against NYT. And for what? No more registration screen that NYT has every right to request for providing all that content? Why don't you guys go do something useful and rattle your pitchforks against Microsoft's registration program for XP instead of bitching about something that barely registers as an inconvenience?
(p.s. Don't take my harsh words too personally, that rant's been building up for quite a while now.)
"Derp de derp."
yes, but the hard part is creating the 5 street addresses, birth certificates and credit cards.
Douglas P. Price
I got my Ipod and Flatscreen too. I used 2 disposable email addresses that I put into a special mailbox with procmail. To this day, I still haven't had a single piece of spam or any telemarketing calls. I don't get any more junk mail than usual either.
So what did I get? $800 worth of free electronics for about an hour of work and so did 3 of my friends.
There's even one "thing" that is trading gmail accounts for signing up under his referral id. Sad.
Please, everyone, stop pushing pseudo-free crap. And telling people to sign up and cancel right away to avoid credit card charges is fraud.
This is a newspaper you're reading. You get a free copy of one of the country's best papers, and you're whining about entering an email address and some personal info. Stop bitching, you're not paying anything and the Times doesn't sell your soul to the devil.
One Flaw,
Physical Property=Time * Effort * Material.
Intellectual Property=Time * Effort.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
There is no free lunch. Ever.
If you're thinking of duplication costs; they're low, but certainly not zero. However, until somebody puts forth effort into producing an original work, there's nothing to duplicate.
That takes us back to production: somebody had to pay for the engineering time and resources. Skilled engineering labor is expensive and most decent software projects require teams of people writing the software, docs, distro scripts and doing the QA. Even if this work is done "after hours" the worker could be working at a job that paid or be doing some other activity.
There are ways to get free IPODs. There was a big promotion in Canada by Pepsi that resulted in 2016 IPODs being given away; one every hour of every day from Oct 3rd to Dec 25th (no purchase required). I ended up winning two IPODs - but many teenage Canadians ended up winning between 2-6 IPODs each. I believe there were similiar contests/giveaways by Pepsi in other countries.
$170 check from a free green xbox offer (now closed)
Xbox, from another free xbox offer. (Anyfreegift)
ipod, from freeipods.com
$700 check, from freelaptops4you.
I'll give you $50 to fuck your sister.
Since there is a mathematical formula for how long it takes for the pyramid to collapse, this cycle would then begin anew for each new item offered correct? So if people keep getting in at the top of each new item offered, they'll still be good right?
Also, can anybody vouch for the legitimacy of those other things, particularly the plasma and laptop offers?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
has anyone tried making 5 friends?
is it hard? do you have to go outside?
Software is not "Free" as in beer - when people do publish software Freely , they are doing charity. FOSS software can be sold (RMS sold emacs for 150 USD per copy !!!). But what FOSS tries to seperate is the Cost of Development from Profit per Sale.
I have been (wioll haven been) paid to do some features on the OSS I work on - because somebody really needed it. That's because I created some wealth with my effort (in a wholly capitalistic point of view). And Everyone else gets the stuff for free and in short - Everybody wins.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
A site like these? Rob's Giant BonusCard Swap Meet or The Ultimate Shopper (Safeway)
what's the insightful thing in that?
that's like saying that a pyramid scheme isn't a scam because they paid the first 10% who got in.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It has little to do with the reality of the iPod, or the cost of the iPod. But has everything to do with the offensiveness of the distribution mechanism.
Which is why I systematically 'Foe' everyone I see hawking ponzi-pods.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
If you must work for it, it's not free. You're just working, for a wage of one ipod.
Personally, I'd put in my hours elsewhere and buy one (if an ipod was something I wanted that much) before working for some advertising company as their shill.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
With open source software it's very rare that the product a) does exactly what you want and b) works perfectly out of the box.
Whereas closed source never has any bugs and always does exactly what you want?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
In Germany, we have the PayBack system, where you get something like 1% of each purchase on a separate account or something. It's pretty big over here, and I guess it must be comparable to the courtesy cards you mentioned.
The clue is that these cards are tranferable. So FoeBud got a card, made "Privacy-Cards" with the same barcode, and offered them to people interested in consumer privacy. Several thousand euro were collected, but PayBack wouldn't pay out.
So the whole thing went before a court. The court apparently decided that FoeBud could tell their barcode number to others, but were not allowed to print it out.
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
In this case, the money is probably in the FIRST level or two of the scheme. I already don't have 5 people who would get 5 friends to sign up; and I'd be the first level if I signed up, so they'd get maybe $60-$180 out of me and my friends, and give out *NO* I-pods.
It's also not a true pyramid scheme in the sense that you don't have to pay any money to get in. There's a fine line between a pyramid scheme and just paying people to do sales. My company has a bunch of people we pay JUST to sell stuff. And in fact, some of the people they sell stuff too then turn around and sell it to someone else. We call those people END USERS.
In this case, the people who sign up for offers but don't get iPods are just the end users. The people who manage to get other people to sign up and get iPods are just a cheap sales force.
paintball
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?
Some people are even modding down folks with that in their .sig. I've metamodded those as fair as I personally think the .sig should not be a tool for spam. We deal with enough ads already, we certainly don't need to put up with them in every .sig.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs