Also, there are no apostrophes in plurals.
One more thing:
If you do send the six bucks, you’re a sucker.
If you don’t send the six bucks, you’re a scammer.
There is no option 3.
All these numbers are correct. But here’s what they leave out:
The 50,625 people mailing out letters - they’re mailing out 10,125,000 letters! Also, you’re (apparently) the 7th generation that got this letter (there are six names on the list*). That means that (with the “conservative” 7.5% response rate), 151,875,000 people have been contacted. DATALine must have a VERY extensive database.
*Clearly, you’re not the 7th generation to receive this - you’re the second (the first being the originator), because it’s a scam.
Reminds me of the emails I get that say “THIS WAS VERIFIED WITH SNOPES AND IT’S REAL!!!”
And the next cycle multiplies that by 15 people, and the next, and before long, you have exceeded the population of the Earth. Somebody will be left holding the bag, and it could be you.
- Respond to chain letter
- Lose your money
- Go to jail
- ???
- Profit!
Well, there is the little part about how it’s against the law…
And you aren’t just going to lose $6 on this. You’re going to pay another $40 for 200 names, paper and ink/toner costs for printing 200 letters, and postage costs for mailing the 200 letters. That’s a big loss for the poor-and-desperate types who often get suckered into this kind of thing.
Corollary – Any business that has to tell you that it’s legal is not.
THAT’S NOT TRUE! My business is perfectly legal, and I tell people so. The way it works, you see, is you send me $1, and I send you… ummm… Did I mention my business is perfectly legal? And you can count on that, because why would I say it if it wasn’t true?
Besides… I don’t want to send money to ZOMBIES!!!
A common technique - make a true statement about a reputable company which has no connection with your scam, and hope that the trustworthiness will rub off on the rest of the shady deal.
All it says is that this DATALine company is listed with BBB with no complaints. That is presumably true, but it in no way implies that BBB has given its blessing to the letter.
I fell for a scheme like this when I was 14. They used to run ads in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics all the time stating you could make big bucks stuffing envelopes (don’t know if they still run the ads, been a long time since I’ve looked at those magazines).
Anyway, my friend and I were always looking for ways to make a buck. We responded to a couple of these ads, thinking it was a legitimate business and that we’d be sending circulars and various other types of junk mail. We did some math and figured if we invested three hours after school doing this, each of us stuffing three envelopes per minute, at say, $2 per envelope (which was what a lot of those ads were claiming you could make), we’d be raking in $1,080 a night, and even more on the weekends. We’d be rich in no time!!! Just send $1 or $2 for more information.
Anyway what we got back was often just a flyer explaining a scheme just like what the OP describes. I remember both of us thinking “What the fuck” trying to figure out what was going on. Our dreams of becoming filthy rich were shattered.
Hard lesson learned, but at least we were only out a few bucks.
It’s the same for scammers who claim that they registered the copyright to their print materials with the U.S. Library of Congress, or for diploma mills who claim that their “university” is registered as an educational institution with UNESCO. Both claims may be true, but since more or less anybody can get these registrations by doing nothing more than paying a fee to the appropriate body, it doesn’t mean anything and certainly doesn’t amount to any sort of accreditation or endorsement.
Reminds me of a classic scene from the Drew Carey Show. Kate is out of work and is sitting at Drew’s breakfast table combing through the employment section of the classifieds. Suddenly she says “ooh—look—eight hundred dollars a day working from home, licking envelopes!” Drew chuckles and replies “if you’re making eight hundred dollars a day at home, it’s not envelopes you’re licking.”
The bottom line is that there is no money coming into this scheme other than from people mailing off their dollars. It’s a zero-sum game. If a few people make a large profit, that means many more people make a small loss. But postage and printing costs (not to mention coughing up two double sawbucks for a mailing list) mean that most people are actually out, what, fifty to a hundred dollars? Even if sending out the letters cost nothing, the average participant would break even. The only way to show a profit is to get in really early while there are still gullible suckers to be hooked.
They sit on a throne of lies!!!
OK, technically it’s correct, it’s not JUST a chain letter; they are ALSO scamming you out of $40 AND stealing your own mailing address to sell to other spammers AND will probably sell your credit card number to the mob in Russia.
With the number of chain letters that get forwarded on the Internet, I find it hard to believe that these things don’t still work.
Funny how this thing used to be all over the Internet, back when “all over the Internet” meant on Usenet (that is, there was no World Wide Web yet).
Almost every time it would come in a post titled MAKE MONEY FAST!
Haven’t seen it in probably a decade. Thanks for the memories…
Oh, we still get this “MAKE MONEY FAST” scheme posted here now and then. It gets reported and removed fairly quickly, though. The mod staff have mod or admin privileges in all forums, not just their assigned forums, so if a MPSIMS mod sees that post in the Pit, for instance, s/he can and will remove the post. That’s one of the things that we’re constantly watching for. I’m pretty much retired from being an admin here, but I will act on spam threads and posts as soon as I see them.
No. The key is just to replace the six names with names of your friends, mail no money, but mail the letters.
In Clause 7 of the chain letter, it warns you about the ghost python-scorpion chimera whose voodoo will kill you if you try this, but, still, you might get lucky. For one thing, I think that chimera is on the T.S.A. No-Fly List now.
In other words, when it comes to pyramid schemes never ever participate in someone else’s: get in at the ground floor and start your own.