Want to make money from your computer? No product, no work, fire your boss, buy an island, blah, blah, blah.

Sometimes you only have to pay $90/month(for 10 – 24 months), with the option of making all payments outright.  This business has an image of legitimacy and being a business.  

What exactly is this scam?  I call it electronic pan-handling.  It is true that there is no product to sell.  You buy a pile of chain e-mails describing how advertise.  You make a website, run an ad in a newspaper, make a cd, put up billboards, and more.  The goal of your advertising?  To get others to pay you for the chain e-mails on how to advertise.  Then they can try to get still others to buy the chain e-mails on how to ask yet others for $90/month as well.  To make this simple, I say cut out the middle steps.  Stand on a corner and ask for $5.  If someone asks you why, you can say, “when you pay me $5, I will in turn give you the privilege to ask others for $5.”  Its ludicrous and furthermore its merely glorified begging.

Other varieties of this scam involve giving someone $5 and putting your name on a list.  You pass the list around and others will pay you and pass the list around some more.  They claim you will make $40,000 in no time.  Does that make sense to you?  Someone is getting the shaft – big time!  For you to make your $5 turn into $40,000 – that requires 8,000 losing their $5 and getting nothing in return.  How good do you feel about your money now?  ‘But,’ someone smart person will say, ‘they will make their money too.’  Hmmmmm……..  This is a pyramid and the base keeps getting larger.  For the next 8,000 people to make their money they need to rob 64 million people that don’t get their money back. If you go to the next stage you would need 512 billion people to give the 64 million people their money. 

Its stupid folks.  One person wins and everyone else loses.  They try to make you think everyone wins.  Try this then: get 10 of your friends to go inside a closed room with $5 each.  Make whatever elaborate system you want and try to rig it so after passing their money around they all walk out with $50.  It won’t work.  One schmuck will make $50 and the other 9 will want to beat him up.

How to protect yourself: Don’t be greedy.  Don’t give money away for the privilege of trying to bilk someone else.  Its just plain wrong.  If someone tries to hoodwink you into this ‘business’ – make them feel really bad.  Sit down with them and show them how unsupportable the base is.  Ask them, ‘would you really feel good stealing all that money from so many people?  Do you feel good trying to steal from me?  If you came here to rob me – don’t ask!  Bonk me on the head and help yourself – creep!’  Okay, okay, maybe that’s taking it a little far but you get the point.

How to exact revenge: I’m not 100% sure on the legal copyright laws on this – but moral law dictates that this method is fine.  First we need a wealthy benevolent person to outright buy the chain letters that make up this ridiculous business.  He would be out $2000 or so for this purchase.  Then he should make a high profile web-page and post all information for free.  Problem solved.  No one would buy another plan since the information is truly worthless and they would have no buyers of some letters that are free.

And as for the $5 list scam – people will pass on the letter without paying the money.  For what its worth – pass the letter on and hope you can rob some poor widow who forwent her supper to send you 5 bucks that you will blow on beer.