In the back of Popular Mechanics, I’ve noticed ads in the “business opprotunities” section for a company that supposedly offers to pay a large amount of money for taking pictures (over $200/roll). Naturally, this reeks of some sort of scam. Does anyone out there know the truth about this?
Oh, and the webpage of this company is
(active link to commercial site deleted - Nickrz)
[Note: This message has been edited by Nickrz]
And all they want in return is a “processing fee” with your sign up information. It’s to cover the “administrative costs”, you see, of setting you up in this fine opportunity. But then they go on to say that the fee is fully refundable on your first submitted roll. Hmmm, what happened to those administrative costs they had to cover?
You send them money and:
A) never hear from them again
B) get a system so complex that no human could complete it, thus forfeiting the " admin fee"
C) they claim your work is not up to their high standards, and you forfeit the “admin fee”
Never pay an up front fee for a job.
The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs. – E. Grebenik
I suspected it would be one of those, but the question is, exactly what?
Ah, just give 'em a PiNG:
(copious promotional information regarding a purely commercial venture deleted - Nickrz)
Give em a call 
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Come on, do you actually think they’re going to tell you the whole truth?
I’ve heard some folks will pay big money for taking pictures from museums.
– Greg, Atlanta
Once, when I was a gullible teenager, I got suckered in by a get-rich-quick scheme quite similar to this (if not the same one … I can’t remember the name of the company)
Anyhow, the way it worked was, you sent them $30 (do you have any idea how many burgers I had to flip for that money??) and they sent you a little bookley of valuable information that cost them approximately 30 cents to produce. The other $27.70 went to cover the “valuable information” contained within.
The way it worked was, you had to go around and peddle this business to local merchants and hope they’d give you a bit of advertising space in their stores. Your incredible system consisted of a videocamera set up to record other people’s snapshots so they could watch them on their VCR. The manual also provided a handy list of public domain songs that you could record onto the tapes.
In short, my $30 would have been better spent going to see Ishtar 5 times.
As a rule, anyone that wants you to pay money up front for a job is a scam, plain and simple.
The problem is that peoples’ eyes cloud up with dollar signs and they don’t realize the feasability of such offers. What roll of film could be worth that much money? You take 2 rolls of pictures and that’s enough money for someone to fly to your location and take the pics themselves.
No roll of film is worth $268.20 … unless you got some nude pics of Tori Amos. I’ll put up $268.20 for a roll of those ANY day!
–puff
Hmm… It would seem that this isn’t as well known as the envelope-stuffing scams.