Whats the scam behind this scam?

Factual Questions
1

I’ll try to be brief, yet give as much detail as I can.

A friend of mine (same guy that fell for the Nigerian scam, $1500 vaccum sales scam, Amway scam, etc. etc.) told me about an “investment opportunity”.

Somehow, he invests X amount of dollars, sets his computer up to “surf” websites automaticly for a couple weeks or so, then he gets a “percentage” on his investment.

I didn’t pump him for any info, knowing his track record. I immediatly smelled a rotting carcass and let the issue die a quite death. I have a pretty good idea whats happening, but need to get the real story from some of you Dopers in the know so I can a) avoid this like the plague*, b) talk this guy out of it, armed with facts c) laugh myself till I piss.

Help me out!

I would never get involved with something like this. Tonight, he came over to my house and told me his computer crashed * and wanted to use mine to get his “surf-groove” on! :eek:

2

There are web companies that expose you to additional advertising whilst surfing the web in exchange for paying you a small amount for surfing, this was very popular before the dot-bomb, now not so much. The idea being that you will generate more ad revenue by buying from vendors advertised then they pay you.

There are shadier web companies that sell you software that pretends that it’s viewing those ads on your behalf (breaking your contract with the original ad company). Typically these are a scam because a) you will get caught b) they don’t work c) there’s a cap on the amount of money you can earn viewing ads (say $40 a month) and the software costs more.

No links for obvious reasons.

3

The key is that since the amounts are small in lawsuit terms, nobody ever sues. They all eat losses.

4

I think the scam is the money he pays up-front for this “opportunity”, and the “surf websites automatically” is just made-up BS to make it sound like something real.

5

Well if a banner ad provider wanted to be really dishonest… ads are sold per 1,000 exposures. If they provided people with a piece of software hopping from page to page to trigger exposures of a customers ad and paying the hoppers a percentage of the ad revenue. Get a couple thousand suckers to run that program and you now are making an extra couple thousand dollars a minute in ad exposures while its running. Give the software users a dollar an hour and laugh all the way to the bank. Especially if the program could somehow handle multiple browser windows something like this could easily suck down thousands of exposures an hour in advertising. Any one business would hardly notice, but someplace big could use a system like this to fleece thousands per day from advertisers.

I would be very suspicious of anything “pay up front” like that, if there is a downline, something real shady could be going on.

6

I’ll see if I can get more detail on this guy’s “investment” and see what he had to put up front.

Thanks for the input so far.