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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
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...
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
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."
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.
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
yes, but the hard part is creating the 5 street addresses, birth certificates and credit cards.
Douglas P. Price
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.