I know a few great scams, which I’ll describe here. The question is, which of these is the greatest scam (or is there yet one even greater, unknown to me?)
The poetry contest. You take out a little ad in some magazine, like Harper’s, inviting people to submit their poems for publication. Once you have enough poems, you send a note to each and every poet saying, “Guess what? You won! Your poem will be published in this fancy, gold-bound volume, which you can buy for only $99.95.” Most of the poets will buy your book, which they would not have done, had they not been winners.
The prestigious journal. You get academics to write scholarly articles, which ordinarily no one would read. You get other academics to read the articles, to make sure they deserve to be in a prestigious journal. Finally, you get universities to buy the articles from you, which are now bound together in a fancy journal. Universities will pay almost any amount of money for your journal, despite the fact it was entirely produced by their own employees.
The novelist prize. This is actually a variant of #1, but w/e. You organize a contest, like this one, for novelists who are especially desperate. You charge an entry fee, of say $100. You then pick some winners, at random, if you want, and the prize is they get to put a sticker on their next book saying they won your prize. Your only cost is the stickers.
The game-picker. This one’s a bit more complicated. You send out an email, saying you have system for predicting who’s going to win the next big game. But you don’t expect the recipient to take your word on faith; instead you’re going to send him the winner of the next big game for free. You send it out to the largest number of addresses you can get your hands on. Say, a million. In half of them you predict team A will win; in half, team B. After the game, you disregard the losers, and rinse and repeat. You do it, say four times. At the end of which you’ve got 65.5k 4-time winners. You say, “look, the chances of guessing right four times in a row is 16:1, or just over 6%. I think that proves my system works. Send me $99.95, and I’ll send you the winner of the next game.” You’d only need a thousand response to make $100k on the deal. This scam works for anything where people gamble, and there are two possible outcomes (like whether a stock will go up or down).
I think he was confused about your intent in posting this thread. If you want a general discussion of scams, this should be in IMHO. If you want to focus on academic journals and peer review, that’s probably more of a GD thread.
Certainly Ponzi schemes are greater scams than those mentioned, at least in terms of the volume of money one can make. Except for the game-picker scam the other three aren’t necessarily illegal or entail fraud. If you want to look at legal scams, you ought to include payday loans, many insurance plans, third party extended warranties, +shipping and handling, and many more which will pay off better.
An interesting GD thread is how long can the ‘prestigious journal’ model hold out when there are far better means of sharing experimental results, tapping a larger community of peer-review, and all of this can be done for essentially free.
For example, most scholarly authors produce a manuscript that is basically publication grade at the outset. It can be posted anonymously as a .pdf to a field’s website. The article can be anonymously read and commented on by anyone with the appropriate background, and once it reaches a certain threshold of approval, it is fully published and available to all who can download it.
