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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/
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!
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
It does work. You fill out offers from three companies and wait. In my case, two visa's and AOL. Once the iPod came AOL was cancelled (under the no billing time) and the visa's were cancelled. I used a P.O. Box from a company that would accept packages from ups and fedex (MBE). After I had gotten two iPods, the MBE account, AOL, temp hotmail address and Visa cards were cancelled.
No junk mail at my house. No spam. Free iPods.
I'm not complaining.
Well, thanks for scamming the scammers, scammer. Hopefully "Gratis, Inc." will go out of business as fast as AllAdvantage did a few years ago. If anyone remembers them. :)
Power to the Peaceful
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 .
Do you wonder why apparently rational Slashdot users ....
What slashdot have you been reading, exactly?
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Just for you I have a new sig!
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
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!
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.