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FIB - Scams 101 - Ye Olde Archives
Posted By: The Roadie <wcarton@flash.net> In Response To: New two step method will earn you big money is a scam (Peter)
Thursday, 31 March 2005, at 5:35 a.m.
> New two step method that will earn you big money is a scam.
Back in 1994, when AOL first connected their closed membership to the wider Internet's set of newsgroups, thousands of AOL newbies flooded out into the world, suddenly thinking that AOL had created 17,000 new message forums JUST FOR THEM!
Many of them were infected with the gullibility virus, and thought you could get rich if only you send a dollar to each of six names on a list, everybody else would do the same thing. So for a few months after September, 1994, we had to endure thousands of postings all with the subject line "Make Money Fast!!!" so we called them MMFs for short.
A group of us started tracking, archiving, and reporting these idiots, who we dubbed MMFools, and put the data up on a web site called the Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation: http://www.mmfhoh.org/index.php This site's heyday was around 1997-1998 but its message forum still gets a few posts a week. We had data bases of the top thousand or so participants, ran quite a few takedown projects where we had to infiltrate the membership of a few programs that were structured to be "cheatproof", and the site owner (not me) was commended by various authorities and state's Attorneys General for the volunteer effort.
Best we could figure, the only ones ever to make real money (a few thousand dollars at most) from these schemes were the spammers who sent out the emails. The going rate was $149 for a million emails, and if you were a participant in the $5/four reports variant of the scheme, one of the reports you were selling contained information on who to pay to do the spamming for you. That's how they got more business from new participants. One of the biggest spammers at the time was Fred Pacheco, whose day job was at an auto parts store in Providence, RI. We nicknamed him "garage boy", but he was busted by an FTC sting in 2000-2002. Read more here: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2002/02/eileenspam1.htm
A little bit like the 419 Nigerian advance fee frauds nowadays, these scams only prey on people who are both gullible and a bit larcenous at heart already. So of all the scams worthy of our volunteer time to take down, MMF sank to the bottom of the list because it really wasn't raking in the moolah like other abuses.
If you want to see even now how many people participate in these things, just use your favorite search engine to run a search on one distinctive phrase used ONLY in the false testimonials in these cons: "grumbled to doris". Make sure to include the quote marks so you get hits on web pages that contain that exact phrase. You'll be surprised at how many are still around.
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