[Every Monday I post CoN in alt.ezines, in the hopes to get a larger coverage and to gain more readers. Sometimes it works.
I noticed lately that there has been an increase in those annoying MMF posts that are spamming almost every newsgroup out there. For those that don't know MMF simply claims that by sending a dollar to the five users mentioned on the list, removing the name at the bottom and reposting it several billion times (1,000 million for UK readers) on every newsgroup, you can make up to $50,000.
You have to be an idiot to believe this -- many do. However, I already ran into this type of messages several hundred times. I found this message on alt.ezines, and asked the author if I could use it.
If you'd like to read one of those MMF messages, load your news-browser, pick a group, any group, and just look for messages that say 'Make Money Fast!'.. you can't miss them, trust me. --Leandro ]
"J. McGuire" (jmcguire@wtsoft.com) wrote on alt.ezines:
Just for entertainment value, I might as well reply to this latest instance of this wretched spam for once. Who knows... maybe there's some newbie out there who might see it and be discouraged from perpetuating this endless thing. Let's take a few choice bits of this apart....
JoeSchmoe@jomama.com [Josh Ganger, on clarityconnect.com] wrote:
Just look at the facts and consider your options
A good place to look at those facts and options is: http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/chainlet.htm
Okay, so that's a bit dull and boring. After all, the US Post Office wrote it... so try http://www.clark.net/pub/rolf/mmf/ instead.
fact 1) The Internet is growing at a rate that makes it DOUBLE in size in about every 4 months.
fact 2) There are 40+ million people with Internet accrss.
Amusingly enough, both of those two "facts" have been posted as part of this particular scam for the past year or so. I don't see the 320 million users we would have if it was 40 million and growing 8X annually a year ago, but if the 40 million is the current size, and only the 4 month figure was accurate back then, there would have been just 5 million users a year ago... and AOL alone had almost that many. Nice numbers, but nothing but hot air. (hot bits?)
fact 3) If the following system didn't work, why doesn't anyone post that it is a failure. In fact there are hundreds of posts stating that it works and works well.
Because the people who post these stupid things generally get their net accounts yanked so fast that they can't post anything at all any more, especially how stupid they feel and how much trouble they're in now.
Actually, I happen to have been in contact with one such person who was lucky enough not to get his account terminated by his ISP. Wanna know how well this scam works? In a spammer's own words....
If you have to know, I got a reaming out by my ISP. And no I didn't recieve letter one in the mail.
fact 4) It is legal since you are paying for a service...
And exactly what service are you paying for, again? Someone posts this MMF spam. You send them money. And they do -- what? Post it again on your behalf? 50,000 times for the 50,000 people who send them all this money? Not hardly. You're not paying for a bloody thing. The person you send the money to never does *anything*. YOU do the re-posting, with THEIR name on the list.
What investment you ask?..... Well around 7 dollars and a couple hours of your time.... Thats all you are risking....
Unless you count risking some rather hefty fines, a couple of years of federal prison time in the US, rather more than that if you live in Canada, and one sort or another of really nasty governmental type stuff in an awful lot of other places.
"Please put me on your Mailing List"(Thats what I mean about a service)
And what mailing list is this again? What service?
Of course, posting one of these MMF (Make Money Fast) scams *will* get your name on a bunch of mailing lists... but do you really want to be on a list of people who are both greedy enough to fall for something like this and stupid enough to post your name and address to millions of people who might not like you? Do you want to get on a list of people to be audited by your country's tax agency, who probably takes a dim view of $50,000 of undeclared income? Do you want to get on a list of people to be investigated by the US Postal Inspection Service or your local equivalent?
There are at least 19000+ active ones at anyone time so there are plenty to go around. The more groups you post to the more people who will respond....
Oooh, is this ever true. I saw one where a very small ISP pleaded with net posters not to send them any more complaints, their mail system had been overloaded by the thousands they'd already received about a MMF scam posted from their site.
You, too, can totally piss off thousands of people. And then you give them your name and address. Smart.
As for the great mathematical "proof" of how much money you get, consider this: Let's say the first guy who posted this thing really got 50,000 people to send him $1 each. For each of *those* 50,000 people to make their own $50,000 it would require 2,500,000,000 -- that's 2.5 *BILLION* people (2,500 million for UK readers) sending those dollar bills all over the world.
2.5 billion people is half the population of the planet... and MANY times the population (let alone the sucker population) of the Internet. And remember, that's just for the first 50,000 people who sent $1 to the guy who invented this to get their own $50,000 payoff.
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