"Free movie tickets" my ass!!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So my friend keeps sending me these annoying e-mails with the subject line, “Get free movie tickets!!” In the e-mail, you click on a link that takes you to http://freeflixtics.com/ Thing is, you don’t really get free tickets, of course there is a catch…

First of all, the person who sent you the mail only gets one free ticket for every five people who “sign up” on the site. Then you only get a free ticket when you get five people to sign up.

Here’s the catch, though… Signing up “requires you to complete an advertising offer from one of our partners” and “most or all of these offers will require a valid credit card.” So basically five of your friends have to buy something online with their credit card just so you can get one free movie ticket.

And, even if you do manage to sucker 5 of your friends into signing up for this scam, you are asked to “please allow 12-14 weeks for delivery.” Wouldn’t it be much easier to just spend $8.50 for a ticket then to nag all your friends to death with spam?

Oh yeah, if you don’t respond to the first e-mail telling you to “Get free movie tickets!!,” you will get many, many reminders. According to the site, you enter “email addresses of friends that you are referring to the FreeFlixTix site, which will trigger an automatic email to be sent to those addresses from you inviting them to sign up on FreeFlixTix, and also additional emails from you reminding them to sign up if they haven’t done so yet.”

Yeah, “additional e-mails” is an understatement. I have gotten more than 10 e-mails “reminding” me to sign up with subject lines such as:
Don’t forget to check this out!
Reminder! Free movie tickets!
Last Reminder! Free movie tickets!

I’ve gotten about 6 “last reminders” so far.

I really don’t appreciate my friend entering my e-mail address into this site…god knows what other types of spam I will get from them. And it really doesn’t seem worth it at all for a free movie ticket to have to get all your friends to “sign up” then you have to “complete an advertising offer” which requires a credit card (so basically you have to buy something, then it takes 3 months for the damn ticket to be mailed to you.) What a scam!

2

Just goes to show you, you can’t get somethin’ for nothin’.

Except for me, of course. I’ve been corresponding with this nice Nigerian man for the last week, and…

3

Can you filter out these emails? If they all contain the phrase “Free movie tickets!” this should be easy to do.

4

I have an acquaintance who is constantly sending me those emails. She then emailed me to make sure I’d gotten the emails 'cause I hadn’t signed up. I told her, yeah, I’d gotten them, but I deleted them since I don’t like to sign up for those, which made her mad. I’ve since wussed out and said, “Gosh, I don’t know why, but those keep going direct to my spam box! I’ve tried to change it, but it just won’t stop.”

5

My sister-in-law signed me up for it. I immediately replied “thanks…but no” and included a link to the relevant Snopes article. That would be, I hoped, the last of it.

Since then, I received a “reminder” about once a month. The first time I got one, I wrote back to her and politely reminded her that I’d said no once, and please don’t bother me with it again. I got a contrite e/mail back replying that she’d had nothing to do with it, and anything else I got from her regarding that site came from them.

So now I’m signed up for their spam list with my work e/mail, lucky guy that I am.

Keep ignoring them, though - I haven’t received one in some time.

6

:smiley:

7

This idiot I used to work with gave my work e-mail to those assholes last June. When I quit that job 10 months later I was still getting those e-mails.

8

Thanks for the Snopes link, I will send it to my friend. I have also e-mailed FreeFlixTix and told them NOT TO SEND ME ANYMORE SPAM and that any e-mails they send are unsolicited. I hope that works!

The problem is, the e-mails are sent from the FreeFlixTix site but the return address is my friend’s e-mail address, so I can’t block the spam without blocking her e-mail address.

9

Man, this scam is suddenly popping up EVERYWHERE! I’ve never seen it for measly little movie tickets, though. The ones I’ve seen are for free iPods or computer monitors. In fact, someone just got banned here today for spamming the boards with links to these scams.

10

:smack:

Bad idea.

11

I hate, hate, HATE this e-mail! One of my friends signed me up a few months ago and I’ve been getting “reminder” messages once a week ever since. Sometimes half of the new messages in my account are bugging me to sign up for tickets.

I really need to update my spam filter.