Scam spam, and dabbling in get-rich-quick schemes.

The only way to get rich quick usually involves some kind of theft.

Every so often, whilst checking email, I peek into my spam folder just in case Gmail put something in it that shouldn’t go there. Last year something from my French professor went directly to the spam folder, which I noticed just after I hit the “Delete All Spam” button… so I had to ask him to send it again. I still thank God for spam filters ’cause I get something like 125 unsolicited sales emails a day, and I remember the bad old days when such things simply weren’t filtered. Still aren’t, in some programs.

Every so often, whilst checking the spam folder, I click on one of them. Mainly it’s out of curiosity. When someone wants to offer me a way to make thousands upon thousands of dollars, while working two hours a day from the convenience of my home computer at home, I know it’s a scam. The only way you can make that sort of money with that little effort is by ripping somebody else off. Might be a corporation, or some poor gullible schmuck, but someone’s getting shafted… and if you buy their course for the low, low price of $175 (which includes thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of resources, although I have no idea how they price this crap) you too can learn to do the shafting.

That is, if you’re not being shafted yourself. And you probably are.

Oh, I know of whence I speak. Back when I was a teenager, I saw an ad in the classified section of my local newspaper: “Earn money stuffing envelopes!” Yes, I too could make loads of money just by filling out envelopes and mailing them. All I had to do was send these folks $10 and they would send me the secret to great wealth with very little effort. And since I had the $10 and the curiosity, I sent for it.

What they sent me was two sheets of paper. One green, one white.

The white sheet was an advertisement for their scheme. “Earn money stuffing envelopes!” It was just like the classified ad, only it had bigger text, pictures, and slightly more detail about how, if I sent them $10, they would send me the secret to great wealth. Seeing as I read this ad first, my natural response was, “I already sent them $10. They want another $10? There are laws against that, aren’t there?”

But then I read the other sheet of paper. The one that contained the secret to great wealth. And that secret was a simple three-step process.

1. Take both the green sheet and the white sheet to a photocopier, and make tons of copies of each of them.
2. Run a classified ad in the local newspaper, promising the secret to great wealth for only $10.
3. Sit back and wait for all the checks for $10 to come pouring in.
4. Whenever someone sends you $10, stuff an envelope with a green sheet and a white sheet, and mail it to them.

In other words, pull the same scam that had just been pulled upon me.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson from this, but no. I actually answered about four other ads for how to make tons of money the easy way. Some were obvious scams, like the ad for “Make lots of money writing book reviews!” which, after I got it, was a pamphlet that essentially told me that if I could convince a newspaper or magazine to hire me as a book reviewer, and if I could convince book publishers to send me free copies of their latest books, I could make lots of money writing book reviews. Some were less obvious, like the fellow who sent me a book explaining how to make tons of money buying foreclosed properties, renovating them, and reselling them. Yes, you can make money doing that; I know people who do it for a living. But I had no money to invest in such a thing, and—which is more important—no interest in doing such a thing. (The scam was in the fact that this guy had claimed his system required no money down, and it kinda didn‘t; you were expected to borrow thousands of dollars so you could get started.)

So you could say I paid for my skepticism. Thankfully it didn’t cost me hundreds of dollars… or even a hundred dollars. But after the fourth time, I gave up on any idea of unrealistic wealth for little effort.

However, this particular scam I just gotta mention. The ad basically says, “You can make hundreds of dollars a day on the Internet… just by blogging!”

Yes indeedy. All you have to do is start a blog. Many places, like Blogger or WordPress, will even host it free. You can blog about anything you like. The secret is that all you have to do is put Google AdWords on your site… and then sit back and watch checks for hundreds of dollars get sent to you regularly.

Um… I have a blog. I also have Google AdWords tacked onto the blog; I put them there largely for the heck of it. I don’t get hundreds of dollars. I don’t get even get tens of cents. That’s because Google AdWords is retarded. Most of the time it posts ads for Jesus junk because it assumes that since I mention Christianity so often, the folks who visit my blog must want that crap. And thanks to this blog post, it’s now gonna post ads for porn. How do I know? ’Cause of the very next paragraph.

Porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn. Porn.

There ya go. Enjoy the ads.

(You know, I’m just gonna be all kinds of disturbed if now the AdWords suddenly start generating money…)