MAKING money for nothing and FINDING chicks for free

15 October 2012 — dan

In the comments to my post about people who think that all I do is beg for money on the Internet, Fallingwater asked:

Do you think a single, low-expense person can actually, really make a living with a site such as yours in 2012? I'm talking referrals, sponsorships and such, not living off donations (not that I'd mind, but I think you'd need a Wikipedia-like amount of readers, and possibly Jimmy Wales' creepy face, to pull that off).

I think you definitely can, even without staring into the soul of everybody who visits one of the most popular Web sites ever.

(Should I decide to try that, I would of course use...

Daniel B. Nosemonster

...this picture.)

That doesn't mean it's easy to make money with a Web site these days, though.

The main problem is that there's no way for a review site or similar enterprise to make a decent amount of money from the beginning. If it's a review site, every review can make you a small but non-trivial amount of money for the first week or so of its life, and then long-tail off into cents per day. But if you've got a thousand pages each making you 15 cents a day, you'll be doing OK. When you've only made it to the 50-page mark, though, you could easily be grossing no more than 25 bucks a day, which ain't gonna pay the rent in most of the Western world.

If you're in Africa or eastern Europe or something then this could of course still be a very workable proposition, but making affiliate deals with local businesses, generally on a per-sale basis, is a major way for small sites to get going, and local businesses in Uganda have a lot less money to throw around. There may also be major obstacles to getting money from richer countries sent to you in a poor one; I don't know.

I have always had it very easy. This is partly because I was smarter with my money during the dot-com nonsense than some of my friends. (Shiny new car and inner-city apartment? Nope, I'll go with rusty used car and living with mum, thanks. I did blow a surprising amount of money on this toy, though - brushless motors were EXOTIC back then.)

My easy ride was also partly because I for some reason am good at writing, and at understanding computers.

(I think Michael Bywater was partly responsible for this. He wrote the computer column in Punch in the eighties, giving me the chance to read comedic writing about Lotus 1-2-3 when I was a small child with absolutely no understanding of what this software actually did, but he also anonymously wrote the gonzo-ish "Bargepole" column, which I also didn't really understand but which connected some of my neurons in quite novel ways.)

I've had it so easy mainly because I was lucky, in the abstract sense of being born white and male in a rich country, and in the less abstract sense of just having job opportunities fall in my lap. The small publisher that was my first gig turned out to be based walking distance from my house (or, more accurately, from my mum's house), and my fairly brief gig with the Dark Lord Murdoch came via a headhunter. I think I had to ask one or two magazines to let me write for them, but mainly they asked me.

You don't need this sort of implausible good fortune to make a Web site that makes a modest but live-on-able amount of money, but you do need a way to ride out the period of time while you make the site big and well-known enough for that income to build.

To do this, presuming you're not already wealthy or a kid living at home, you need to start the site as a hobby in parallel with a real job. Preferably the kind of real job that lets you sneakily work on your Web site while you're there, which can actually be done legitimately if you're a parking-station attendant or late-night petrol-station cashier or something, so a significant portion of your job description is "sit right there, and remain awake".

You also, of course, have to come up with some sort of idea for your site that can make money. The mass affiliate deals like Amazon or eBay are unlikely to be adequate, even if you do loathsome Sell Sell Sell stuff, as described in books that use the word "monetize". You need more direct deals with advertisers and retailers to make it work, as I did with Dan's Data and Aus PC Market. I made decent money when I reviewed Aus PC products; I made not much when I reviewed stuff from elsewhere. (And no, I didn't sell the free review product when I was done.)

Because of this, Dan's Data does not make me much money these days, because I burned out on reviewing computer gear years ago, and Aus PC gear reviews were my principal money source. If I were still writing about cases and CPU coolers and monitors all the time then Dan's Data would by itself still make me a passable living, but I just couldn't face another PSU or video card after a while, so now Dan's Data makes pocket-money only.

If you can start a site that covers some niche that (a) isn't already utterly saturated with high-quality journalism (or whatever you plan to do) already, and (b) lets you hook up with a business or three for mutual benefit, you absolutely can still start and run a Web site for a living.

Hell, if you're good enough you can even make adequate money from plain old ads; that's how the superlative Rock, Paper, Shotgun works. They accept donations as well, but I only now discovered that, since their donation page is harder to find than my cunning combined e-mail/donation scheme.

(I think the excellence of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and numerous other big game-review sites qualifies that market as "utterly saturated with high-quality journalism"; I wouldn't pin too much hope on a new game-review site making its owner much money these days. If you write good stuff, though, you can at least count on sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun and news sites like the extremely venerable Blue's News to link to you fairly often. Starting a site that competes with Blue's News, Slashdot and other news sites that've all been taking body blows just from direct review-site RSS feeds a while ago, then Digg and now Reddit is, needless to say, not likely to be an express train to boundless wealth.)

Posted in Money, Shop talk. 4 Comments »

That ain't workin', that's the way you do it!

9 October 2012 — dan

I received this yesterday:

From: [redacted]
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2012 20:49:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dan's Data Page

Hello Dan,

I came across your website, dansdata.com, this evening. I have been considering doing something like this for awhile. I was wondering if you would be willing to share with me how succesful it has been? I am trying to save enough money and invest it so I can live off of dividend payouts. My goal is to be able to be home with my family as much as possible. I have a target of atleast 100k and have managed to to save about 40k on my own thus far. It will takes years however to complete my goal on my own. I need a way to boost my savings. Please help.

Thanks,
[name redacted]

I always wonder how these people come to e-mail me. I've had two this week. I suppose they find my dansdata.com contact-and-donation page, which is titled "Give Dan Money For No Very Good Reason!", and... that's all they read, before clicking the e-mail link.

Because otherwise, they'd notice that people occasionally drop a buck or two in my tip jar because I, you know, wrote a load of stuff, on a very wide range of subjects.

Perhaps I've got this guy all wrong, and what he wants to do is start a Web site and slog away at it for a decade and make money that way. I suspect, however, that he, like the others who more clearly express their desire that I share my money-making secrets, just reckons I must be some kind of expert Internet panhandler. The contact/donation page scores really high in a Google search for "give me money"; I think a search like that is usually where these people come from.

When one of these correspondents seems to have two brain cells to rub together I direct them to my reply to this letter, in which I explain why people occasionally give me money. But all you really need to do is actually read the donation page, on which can be found subtle hints that it is not quite the only page on Dan's Data.

It'd make more sense if these e-mails were widely-copied scattershot spam, but they never seem to be. (Or, at least, Googling a string from them never turns up copies elsewhere.) Even the ones that include a sob story and ask me to send some of my presumed riches to them on account of how their son only has a burlap sack full of leaves for a body, or something, appear to have been typed in by an actual human and sent to only a few recipients, and quite possibly only to me.

I suppose sending spur-of-the-moment e-mails to someone who might know about getting strangers to send you money for nothing is a better wealth-generation strategy than just visualising money really hard and waiting for your Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet to kick in.

I think you'd probably do better by just sending out PayPal money requests at random, though.

(The people I get PayPal money requests from almost certainly find me via the contact/donation page, too. Only seldom does someone really put in some effort.)

Posted in Money, Shop talk, Strange Tales. 5 Comments »

Zero to Kafka in five minutes, or no money back

16 April 2012 — dan

OK, whippin' up the ol' Business Activity Statement for the first quarter of this year, tum te tum, run the special government BAS-management software and... it tells me I'd better renew my AUSkey certificate before it expires at the end of July.

Bit of an early warning, but OK, fair enough, off we go to the AUSkey site, which I leave open for a while as I enter stuff for my next BAS in the other special software that apparently a few other governments inflict upon their populace. (As is traditional with such things, this program likes to pop up dialog boxes telling you to enter a date for something, when you've entered data in some other field first, and then click on the date field intending to do the thing it is haughtily preventing you from doing until you click "OK".)

A few minutes later, I come back to the AUSkey site and click "login", whereupon it tells me my session has timed out and I have to go back to the home page, which is exactly where I already was.

What session? I don't have a session yet! I haven't logged in!

OK, argh, whatever, I log in again and it tells me I don't have the special AUSkey software which I thought I had but OK, again whatever, click the thing to download the software and... back I go to the home page again.

Go through that loop again until I realise that the site is attempting to tell me via mental telepathy that it does not support Chrome. Try Firefox instead, which to the government's credit does actually work and lo, now I do have the software that I installed whenever I went through this palaver the last time, and it doesn't even seem to need 283 updates since I last used it!

Righto, off we go, let's renew our certificate...

Hang on - there doesn't seem to be an option to do that anywhere.

Gee, could that perhaps be because the AUSkey does not, in fact, ever actually expire?

Why yes, that is the case.

Did the other program really tell me to update my AUSkey?

I quit it and run it again, and it doesn't say shit this time. I could have sworn it said I had to renew my AUSkey certificate but... now I... I just don't know.

You know, part of the reason why I wish Australia didn't have any submarines is that I'm not sure anyone's ever clearly explained what purpose they're expected to serve. (They apparently performed quite well in war games against the USA, which I'm sure will make all the difference if we decide to go to war with America. Or, marginally less crazily, with China, whose attack subs only outnumber ours 59 to six, not counting their entirely insignificant five nuclear ballistic missile submarines.)

Most of the reason, though, is that I don't think an institution that can create a system like this should be be allowed anywhere near explosives.

Posted in Money, Strange Tales. 3 Comments »

Catches fire, would buy again, AAA+++!

6 April 2012 — dan

I bought a couple of sets of red LED lights on eBay; two ten-metre 100-LED strings for $US15.96 delivered.

You know the ones. Little lightweight controller box that always starts in cycle-through-all-modes mode, with a button that has to be pressed seven, or is it eight, times to get the darn things to just stay on constantly (or as close to it as the flickery PWM controller can manage).

Generally these cheap lights seem great. I've been very pleased with the others I've bought in the past, most recently the 220V-rated multicoloured ones from this seller, which seem to work very nicely from Australian power.

So I bought some red ones, alleged to work from 110 to 220 volts, from this other seller.

I plugged these new ones in while holding the wound-up lights in my hand, just to see if they worked at all, and they seemed OK.

And then, there was a pain.

In my hand.

A... burning pain, restricted to a few very small spots.

This puzzled me.

I adjusted my grip to avoid the ouchy spots, and observed a few thin trails of smoke rising from the wound-up lights.

I unplugged them.

I tried the other set.

Same deal.

These sorts of LED lights are configured as several long series strings, with a single inline current-limiting resistor (which, being one resistor at the start of a long series string of LEDs, probably doesn't actually limit current very well at all) in series with the first LED in each string.

[UPDATE: Now that I'm peeling one of the lights apart, it's apparent that they've actually got resistors on several of the LEDs early in each string. Here's a great analysis of these things and how to stop them flashing and flickering, forever.]

These resistors were getting very hot, very fast, and raising smoke from the clear PVC insulation over them.

Seizing the opportunity to use my variac and its delightfully mad-scientist-ish giant knob, I tried feeding the lights 110V instead of Australia's nominal-230V mains.

Now, they worked fine. The resistors got a bit warm, but not unduly so.

Fault located, then.

Next, like a damn fool, I told the seller that they were selling devices that were a fire hazard in 200V+ countries, and they should probably stop doing that, and could I have my money back, please?

Anybody who's ever filed an eBay/PayPal dispute over a defective item of low dollar value sold by some dude in China knows what happened next.

I opened a Dispute, I asked for a refund, they told me to get lost. I escalated the Dispute to a Claim, and eBay/PayPal in their wisdom told me to send the items back to the seller via registered mail to get my refund, which would of course be five bucks less than it'd cost to send the goods back.

(And if the seller decided to tell eBay that what I'd sent them was a box of newspaper, I probably wouldn't even get that.)

Perhaps if I'd lied and said the goods never showed up at all, I might have had a chance. Since I tried to warn the seller about maybe setting their customers' houses on fire, though, I got to pay the price.

Which is not in itself a big deal, of course, besides THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING GRRR. It's not a dead loss, either; I can always chop the LED strings off the controller box and run them from some appropriate non-flickery DC power supply. This is not very difficult to do, and involves a lot less soldering than building an LED array used to.

I feel such a tit, though. Every time, I go through this idiotic routine, like Charlie Brown with Lucy's damn football.

Sometimes there's a bit of variety, like when I was trying to get a refund for an item described as new which turned out to be used, and the Hong Kong seller seemed to sincerely believe that "but if I give you a refund, I will lose money!" was an ironclad reason why he need not do so.

(Eventually he tried "OK, we'll give you a few bucks back, provided you lie in your feedback and say there wasn't a problem.")

I love the PayPal replies, too. You've proved that sending the item back will cost more than the refund? Well, now apparently it's a "judgement call" whether you should do so!

And then, "We know situations like this can be difficult and appreciate your patience and cooperation as we work toward resolution."

I really wish eBay/PayPal would be realistic in these exchanges and just say "hey, it's a flea market, almost always it works OK, but you got ripped off this time, it happens". Instead, just to twist the knife, when you give up and Cancel a PayPal claim, "...you agree that this complaint has been resolved to your satisfaction"!

(The only alternative is to wait until the clock runs out, whereupon PayPal tell you that the lack of resolution of your complaint is entirely due to your tardiness.)

So, in summation: EBay/PayPal aren't getting any better about this stuff.

And, if you're in Australia and want cheap twinkly LED lights in many colours, try these.

And don't buy stuff from this dickhead.

UPDATE: Lo, a message has arrived from the dickhead him or her self!

I'm sorry for that that our product make you no happy,
anyway, can you help to revise the feedback to positive and we'll refund
you.

Yeaahhh... no. Product still fire hazard. Bad seller! Bad!

Posted in Electronics, Money, Scams. 7 Comments »

Please at least pay us for the postage

17 January 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

I don't know if this really qualifies as a science question, but: How do bills for zero dollars and zero cents get sent to people?

I'm guessing that it's something like the process you explained that leads to crazy negative numbers in installer disk-space calculations - maybe the system's screwed up and thinks you owe negative money (or you really do, because you overpaid), but there's a sanity check that rounds negative numbers to zero, and then fails to stop a bill being sent anyway.

Am I right?

Jiri

Exactly this sort of thing has been referred to since time immemorial, or at least since the early days of office automation...

...as a "computer error".

Which it isn't, of course. Once in a very long while a cosmic-ray strike or failing power supply or actual hardware defect does really cause a computer to make an error, but the overwhelming majority of "computer errors" are actually programmer errors. The computer is doing exactly what it was told to do, whether that's sending a bill for $0.00, or charging a startled pensioner for a hundred million kilowatt-hours of electricity, or falsely saying an e-mail came from FinkyPieheimer@zoobatz.com.

One programming error that can lead to a zero dollar bill - and, in due course, to second requests and final demands and then the attention of lawyers, if only because the lawyers are happy to round the ten seconds needed to recognise the mistake up to about ten billable hours - is using the wrong kind of variable.

In the real world, money comes in dollars and cents, pounds and pennies, rupees and extremely un-valuable paise, and so on. There's no such thing as a fraction-of-a-cent coin.

In computers, everything can be chopped up into arbitrarily small pieces, if necessary. There may be some good reason to do this for certain calculations applied to currency amounts (though I can't think of one), but if you do, before any of the results get turned into actual money being paid into accounts or demanded from clients, the numbers should be rounded into an integer number of cents (or whatever other currency unit's being dealt with).

(This process can be exploited, in the classic "salami slicing" scam where a great many fractions of a cent are sneakily diverted to the scammer's account by, for instance, always rounding down, even when the fraction being rounded is larger than 0.5.)

If a programmer uses, say, a single-precision floating-point variable to hold a monetary value, it's easy for the limited precision of the variable to, when mathematical operations are performed on it, end up at 0.9999 (probably with a few more digits) instead of 1, or 0.0001 instead of zero. In the latter case, a system that doesn't round off the imprecise value to what it should be, and subsequently starts the billing process on any account where the amount owing is greater than zero, will send idiotic zero-bills to customers.

(Or the only slightly less stupid version, a bill for an amount less than what the company paid to post the bill to you.)

There are many other ways for this to happen, though, thanks to the many ways in which programmers can make a mistake. A billing system could, for instance, fail to notice previous overpayment, decide to send a bill, then apply the overpayment to the account balance and send a bill for the net amount, which could be zero or negative. Or it could decide to send a bill to a customer who legitimately owes money, and then accidentally print the amount that some other, fully paid-up, customer owes on the bill.

Just because a company's got thousands of employees and annual turnover greater than the whole economy of some nations does not preclude this from happening. As Daily WTF readers know, staggeringly expensive "enterprise" software can be very, very badly written.

Psycho Science is a regular feature here. Ask me your science questions, and I'll answer them. Probably.

And then commenters will, I hope, correct at least the most obvious flaws in my answer.

Posted in Money, Psycho Science. 9 Comments »

You have money you didn't know about! Give us some of it!

16 November 2011 — dan

I love it when I don't have to go looking for an interestingly fishy business proposal, because some obliging organisation mails it to me.

(It's even better than unsolicited crank e-mail.)

Fishy letter

Strictly speaking, this one wasn't actually mailed to me, but to my partner Anne. It wasn't precisely aimed at her, either; they had our old address right, but if the recipient's name had been Norma Jeane Baker, the letter would have been addressed to Jeane Norma Baker.

So anyway, it's from an outfit called "CollectionPoint", and they're pleased to tell Anne that there's $AU887.50 waiting for her in an undisclosed location. Apparently CollectionPoint do debt recovery too, for a fee of 25% plus GST. They don't quote a fee for this other kind of money recovery, but I think it's safe to say it's not small.

We're not exactly rolling in dough at the moment, so a forgotten nest-egg could be quite handy.

(Do send me some money if you feel like it. We're hardly on the bread-line, though; I assure you that the lights will stay on, the cats will still get their little tins of fancy fish and the freeloading cockatoos will get their seed without your kind assistance.)

The questions that immediately occurred to me were, of course, "does this money actually exist?", and "is this outfit charging a fee for something you can do quite easily yourself?"

The answers to these questions are surprising and unsurprising, respectively.

"Unclaimed money" has been a scam-artist favourite for a long, long time. Unexpected inheritances. Prizes in lotteries you never even entered. A permutation in which the money may not actually strictly speaking be yours, but a morally upstanding person says you can still get hold of it, for a price. Some sort of purported government involvement. The list goes on.

The unclaimed-money business has even spawned meta-scams, in which the sucker pays for an information pack or franchise opportunity or something so they can start a work-at-home business finding unclaimed judicial judgements, or whatever, and creaming off a fat commission.

But CollectionPoint actually are telling us about money we really can claim. We'll claim it as soon as we can make a big enough pile of ID documents.

CollectionPoint are also, however, offering to take people's money to help them do something that is not actually difficult to do - or at least not significantly more difficult to do - by yourself.

The Australian government has a site called "Moneysmart" that'll point you at various unclaimed-money searches. Anne found the money CollectionPoint are talking about via the NSW Office of State Revenue site. Which is presumably the same way CollectionPoint found it.

So CollectionPoint do provide a helpful service. They alert you to the existence of money you probably can actually collect. And then you can throw the CollectionPoint letter away and go and collect your money the free way. CollectionPoint do not appear to be breaking any laws.

Well, they're not breaking any laws right now, anyway. The Australian Government's Department of Veterans' Affairs are happy to list CollectionPoint on their scam information page - apparently CollectionPoint sent letters to war widows claiming to be acting on behalf of that Department. And it's not hard to find other people talking about CollectionPoint in not-entirely-complimentary terms.

CollectionPoint come off pretty well in this blog post, for instance, until several allegedly separate people show up in the comments, all loudly defending CollectionPoint and all suffering from a suspiciously similar inability to construct a sentence, or in many cases even a word.

CollectionPoint also score themselves a mention in this Age article; apparently CollectionPoint have sent out follow-up letters implying - but not exactly actionably saying - that if you don't use their services, you'll miss out on the money altogether.

A commenter here says that after a CollectionPoint letter put him onto some money he could claim, and he claimed it himself without using CollectionPoint's services, CollectionPoint sent him a bill.

This bloke says CollectionPoint offered to collect $500 owing to him for a mere $160 - a 32% fee. Even Today Tonight doesn't like them.

Oh, and according (PDF) to the Consumer Action Law Centre, CollectionPoint charged a 25% fee for recovering some unclaimed superannuation money for an elderly client after he provided them with the identifying information he could have used to get the money back for free. But then CollectionPoint jacked up the 25% fee by adding another 10% GST charge (so 27.5%, altogether). The Consumer Action Law Centre took the case to court, and (another PDF) the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal decided that CollectionPoint were indeed gouging their client, and reduced the fee payable to CollectionPoint by 45%.

The funny part, though, was that in response to this lawsuit CollectionPoint filed their own, in the same court, against the Consumer Action Law Centre's lawyers. They alleged "misleading and deceptive conduct" and an obscure kind of defamation, "injurious falsehood", which is becoming less obscure after recent reforms to defamation law in Australia.

In my non-lawyerly estimation, I think the result of this counter-suit can fairly be described as "widespread puzzlement".

So anyway, we're getting our eight hundred and something bucks.

CollectionPoint won't see a penny of it.

Posted in Money, Scams. 6 Comments »

An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is

4 October 2010 — dan

A reader writes:

Hi Dan,

In Melbourne we have been observing small white hand-written signs popping up on the sides of roads affixed to all sorts of posts and street signs.

The signs are all similar and say:

www.katrinamurray.com
Lucrative Business

I've had a look at the site, and my "3 scroll page alarm" went off; any page with more than 3 vertical pages makes me suss.

The site never describes exactly what the business is.

Is there a name for these things? Are they common? This is the first I have come across.

Nathan

Yes, they're common.

The deal is, there's some company like Herbalife or something with a bunch of "distributors" who, even when they strenuously protest that they aren't in the multi-level marketing business, do seem to chiefly be selling the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell the opportunity to sell, et cetera, whatever nominal product is hiding somewhere within that vast sky-scraping trapezoid.

It's normal for all of the "distributors" to never mention the name of the particular trapezoid they're part of, but those classic endless "squeeze pages" often contain a subtle clue or two that the offer they're presenting is not quite as extraordinary as they say.

Just paste a phrase or three from such a page into Google, and see how many other people are offering the same amazing opportunity!

(It's easy to find duplicated testimonials, but you should also search for excerpts of the text allegedly written by the person who's making this particular never-to-be-repeated offer.)

"I ran my previous business for a little over 4 years and pretty much lost all my money." ("About 8,510 results" as I write this, but that's a huge over-estimate, because Google doesn't actually give accurate figures for string searches like this. Paging on through the results ends up with exactly 293 results, at the moment. Remember to click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link at the end of the original results, if you want to see how many pages Google actually indexes with your search string on 'em, including ones that're so similar to others that Google doesn't bother displaying them by default.)

"I left on my terms and it occurred due to this wonderful opportunity. Now I work for myself" (120 results)

"not afraid to try new things, I also had a willingness to learn" (This one actually seems to be unique to katrinamurray.com!)

"Imagine not having to beg for time off to do something so simple" (374 results, with a couple of differing opinions about what sport your putative son will be playing.)

"such a great group of people who are willingly assisting me" (Only two hits, again with variation of the words on either side; there'll be three hits when Google indexes this post. Few-hits searches like this one may be helpful in tightening the Venn-diagram intersection of all these get-rich-quick squeeze pages to figure out which of them, if any, are not trying to sell the same product.)

"further, I'd like to tell you what to watch out for. Too many" (228 results)

"bombarding them with constant sales pitches about how much money they" (268 results)

"Associates who have taken advantage of the opportunity I'm offering you have generated multiple streams of income" (215 results)

"This is a real, legitimate, Internet marketing system. The system works perfectly as long as you follow it exactly" (Well, obviously! Why would there be five thousand, one hundred and ninety copies of this text on the Web, if it weren't real and legitimate!?)

And, finally, "The testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and may not be representative of the experience of others." Wise words to live by - so very wise, in fact, that 346 Web pages contain them!

I'm absolutely 100% sure, of course, that katrinamurray.com is completely on the level and offering a real opportunity to sell worthwhile products that everybody needs.

But if you sign up for this particular incredible home business opportunity, you'll still have a problem, because there are obviously a large number of other people in the same damn business. Unless you have a scroll of genocide that allows you to annihilate all of the other functionally, and often literally, identical such opportunities floating around down in the noise floor of our wonderful capitalist world, you're likely to find that no matter how much you hassle your friends, relatives and employees, it's just mathematically impossible to get enough customers to make the big bucks you've been promised.

Perhaps the reason why the actual product is never mentioned on the squeeze page is that it's an amazing new discovery with a whole new wide-open market, and the sellers don't want to give away the secret.

When hundreds of other squeeze pages say the exact same thing, though, this theory seems a little shaky to me.

Posted in Money, Scams. 16 Comments »

Pls snd $$ to get $$$$$, tnx

2 July 2010 — dan

The pitter-pat of bogus PayPal money requests, from lazy thieves seeking obliging victims, continues.

I like this one.

PayPal advance-fee scam

Yep, this dude's running an advance-fee scam. If I send him $US200, he'll allow me to "collect [my] money". Except, of course, there is no actual money. There never is.

What I particularly like about this version of the scam is its pared-down, minimalist nature. "Matt Arcay" never sent me an e-mail, or anything. Just this money request. I have received not the slightest hint of the amount or source of the promised "your money" - just this ridiculous "if you want to collect your money simply agree to this and send the money, so you can receive your money".

(I don't know where scammers learn that odd repetitive grammar that repeats because it is repetitive grammar and redundant and says the same thing over and over. I've received similar messages from different putative locations, like this guy allegedly from Puerto, I'm sorry, I mean PUERTO RICO.)

Perhaps Mr "Arcay" did e-mail me separately, of course, but that message was spam-filtered, so all I received was the accompanying money-request e-mail from PayPal.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the only way "Arcay" contacts prospective marks, though. If they reply asking what the deal is then he knows he's got a live one.

What he really hopes for, though, is a mark who just sends him the $200 immediately. That's probably because they reckon "Arcay" meant to send a ton of money to some other person but has accidentally picked the mark instead. So the mark wants to cash in before "Arcay" discovers his mistake.

In that case, "Arcay" has basically won the lottery. A cow like that probably has a lot more milk to give.

I don't know whether it's possible for a scammer in one of the classic famous-only-for-scams countries, like Nigeria or some other TPLAC, to open a PayPal account. This scammer could actually be in the USA - or "Arcay" could be a money-mule front man for a scammer in some other nation.

(There may be some way to report this blatant fraud to PayPal. I'm not eager to waste another morning trying to figure out how, though.)

Even if it's tricky for people in developing nations to run a scam like this, there's a huge incentive to do so. In urban Nigeria, many people don't even make 60,000 naira per annum, which as I write this is only about $US400. A Nigerian who makes $US1200 a year is doing pretty well, so it's hardly surprising that there's so much enthusiasm about chopping that much and more out of some dumb Westerner's giant wallet.

(The BBC's recent three-part documentary "Welcome to Lagos" is, by the way, excellent.)

Posted in Money, Scams, Spam. 10 Comments »
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