On another message board we’ve been getting a lot of messages like this one. IT’s obviously spam, but is it legal? If it’s not, can anyone cite me a law that i can quote back to these spammers?
Anyway, here it is. It’s long, but I didn’t want to leave anything out.
The Power Of Christ: 2000 years and He hasn’t come yet!
Sorry Cass no law against being an idiot…either on the internet or otherwise
“Ward, You’re upsetting the beaver.”
Barbara Billingsley
Looks like a pyramid scheme to me.
California prosecutes these types of conmen all the time, and send a good portion of them to jail. It’s nothing new. I even remember an episode of Dragnet(1967) that dealt with such a case (“the stories are true, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent”).
That’s what I thought – pyramid scheme. Somebody told me that there were ways around the laws, anybody know what they are?
The Power Of Christ: 2000 years and He hasn’t come yet!
Anything that starts off with “Hey, first of all, please don’t think this is fake and just blow it off. It isn’t. I’ve gotten money from this” can be thought of as fake and be blown off.
Here’s what the Feds have to say about them:
http://www.bbb.org/alerts/ftc.asp
Here’s an explaination of pertainent California law:
Multi-Level Marketing companies are pyramid schemes. To stay legal they have to have a real product that a person who does not sign up as a distributor or dealer or director or what have you can actually put to some use. An example would be Amway’s cleaning products. Several of them do have products, but distribution of the products is never (or, to be charitable, rarely) their reason for being. They exist to build “downlines” that are, basically, the subsequent suckers.
Personal rule of thumb - never trust anything sent by a person who can’t spell “receive.”
Clocks are big.
Machines are heavy.
What is to stop you from just putting your name on the list and not sending out the money?
Seems kind of dumb to me.
If you don’t pay up, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny show up and break your kneecaps.
Surely this is just the electronic version of the old chain letters? Ignore, ignore… or send off the dosh if you prefer - the old ones used to say that if you broke the chain, by not sending the money, or whatever, you wd die within the year - I see they’ve dropped that from this version, which I suppose is progress
Too tired to care whether I make any sense at all
No its not legal & yes you can lose your acct for sending it out. They probably used a mass mailer, capable of sending out 5M/day.
Sometimes I get bored, write them back, say ‘WHen it makes $10,000, have it call me, Ill come pick it up.’
Hmmm…
Ponzi schemes like this…
Sorta reminds me of Social Security.
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
–Lyndon B. Johnson
Want to get rich?
Simply send five bucks to each of the following names, remove the top one, add yours to the bottom, and mail it to six more suck…err…uhh…astute investors.
N oR jVIaL
No j2 Ma|_
jVoR IV)AL
n0 R m/\ |_
N oj2|Vl/\ L
(Voj2 jVIa|_
I actually participated in something like that once. Didn’t use dollars, it asked for postcards - stuff from where you lived and such like. Never heard anything from anyone.
Cave Diem! Carpe Canem!
A friend of mine once sent me an email to participate in one of these, where instead of sending money, you sent the top person on the list a pair of underwear (they’d speficied what kind & size they wanted). I promptly put in in my deleted folder, as I truly hate these kinds of scams.
Several weeks later I was at her house when she brought in the mail. She was all excited because there was a package in there with, can you believe it, a pair of her specified kind of panties! When I asked her why someone would be sending her thong panties in the mail, she reminded me of the email she’d sent. She said she’d already gotten well over a dozen pair, most of which were from Victoria’s Secret!
Seems the reason this one worked so well was that it was just between women, and only passed along to close friends by someone they trusted not to be scamming them. There were no postings on bulletin boards and it wasn’t meant as a get rich quick scheme. Ridiculous as it sounds, it made me regret trashing it - I could’ve used a dozen new pair of underwear!
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
The OP was definitely illegal. If you want someone to quote, go to the MMF Hall of Humiliation at http://ga.to/mmf/ .
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
It’s illegal because it’s a chain letter.
It’s illegal because it uses the mail system to propogate a chain letter.
It’s illegal in many jurisdictions because it involves “spamming” by suggesting posting the letter to newsgroups (other than chainletters.rec)
It’s illegal in those same jurisdictions because they spammed you by sending it to you in the first place.
Unfortunately, it’s not illegal to be stupid, so these things continue to exhibit a life of their own.
I recommend http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Chain_letters/ for further information, as well as some possibilities for humorous responses.
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 15 tons.
-Popular Mechanics, 1949
it would be an illegal lottery if done in Canada - I’ve helped prosecute cases like this one.
and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe
Just because I want to add my two cents and because this is from the United States Postal Service:
Chain Letters