107 captures
11 Jun 1998 - 25 Jan 2021
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About this capture
COLLECTED BY
Organization: Alexa Crawls
Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Collection: Alexa Crawl DI
Crawl DI from Alexa Internet. This data is currently not publicly accessible.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20011215055613/http://www.stopspam.org:80/usenet/mmf/index.html
This series of pages is dedicated to the eradication of that nearly lowest of low slime, the Make Money Fast Internet Chain Letter. I still rank Unsolicited Commercial Email as the lowest of low slime because the perpetrators of UCE know exactly what they are doing, but this stuff comes a close second, because most of the people know exactly how illegal it is and still do it anyway.
Throughout these pages, I have taken care to try to alter any email addresses that can be easily read by the web page mining bots of the UCE'ers, whose slimy web-crawling robots gather all the email addresses they can from web pages to add those names to their recipient list for their unwanted, unwarrented, and probably highly illegal unsolicited commercial email.
"Spamming is a very very bad thing. It's akin to calling your grandmother names while kicking her dog and peeing in her Cheerio's. -- Unknown author (found on usenet)"
Chain Letters, Electronic or Otherwise, are not legal. First of all, I want to point out that no matter what the scam artist tells you in the letter, these little schemes ARE NOT LEGAL, and people HAVE done jail time over them. For example, Dave Rhodes spent a number of years in a Federal Prison (and may still be there for all I know) for his starting of this whole scheme electronically back in the days of the Bulletin Board Services instead of the internet. Whether disguised as a "mailing list," "selling recipes," a "free loan," "selling reports," a "gifting club," "lottery ticket club," or any of a hundred other thin veils, they are still chain letters, and still illegal.
The United States Postal Inspector's office Chain Letter Page has this to say about them:
" There's at least one problem with chain letters. They're illegal if they request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants. Chain letters are a form of gambling, and sending them through the mail (or delivering them in person or by computer, but mailing money to participate) violates Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute. (Chain letters that ask for items of minor value, like picture postcards or recipes, may be mailed, since such items are not things of value within the meaning of the law.)¾
and later on the same page, it says:
"Do not be fooled if the chain letter is used to sell inexpensive reports on credit, mail order sales, mailing lists, or other topics. The primary purpose is to take your money, not to sell information. 'Selling' a product does not ensure legality."
and:
"Recently, high-tech chain letters have begun surfacing. They may be disseminated over the Internet, or may require the copying and mailing of computer disks rather than paper. Regardless of what technology is used to advance the scheme, if the mail is used at any step along the way, it is still illegal.
Those of you who may have come to these pages because one of the moronic letters actually uses my URL to supposedly validate that it is legal have a big surprised coming to you. Yes, it's still illegal, even though the Kick Financial Butt variant claims it's legal and points you here as "proof." The author of that one is as big a scam artist and fool as all the others.
In addition, virtually every ISP (Internet Service Provider) out there will either suspend or terminate your account for pepetuating these illegal items. They violate the laws in every country that they have ever been reported to, as well as all areas of netiquette.
A special note on the "Lottery Ticket Club" scam: The lottery ticket club not only violates ponzi pyramid scam & chain letter laws, but Federal Interstate Gambling laws which make it illegal to send lottery tickets by mail across state lines (also backed up by many State laws) as well - and the argument "they are not being sold, they are gifts" won't cut it in court, since they are the "fee" for being a member of the "club." And while those running the scam stay safe basing their scam in Israel, the members of the "club" are wide open for prosecution.
You will also, within minutes of posting one of these scams, be reported not only to your ISP but to the US Postal Inspector's Service, the Federal Trade Commission, the IRS (or the equivalent of those agencies in your country), the police, and any other agencies that might have any sort of a jurisdiction over this kind of thing in your country.
Your mailbox (if your ISP does not immediately terminate you) will be filled with email, everything from polite information that these are not legal to hate filled letters full of obscenities. If there is any way to trace you (and don't sell the information capacity of the Internet short - you can find virtually anything about anyone), your phone will begin to ring and you will be harrassed by people calling at all hours of the day and night in retribution. No, it's not right - it is never right to abuse others in response to abuse - but it WILL happen. Guaranteed. Your real name and address will be published by those who find it out so that others can harrass you as well.
As many of the articles that can be found by your ISP and the automatic and semi-automatic 'bots that are set up for finding these scams will be cancelled immediately, so you will not profit by your illegal activities anyway. However, some will linger on, chasing ahead of the cancel messages through slow feeds, and you will continue to get flamed and complained about, possibly for weeks. Some people complain without even checking the date of the message. [I teach that if a message is more that 24-48 hours old, don't bother, the perpetrator has already been found and dealt with in most cases.]
Also, these scams just do not work because of the mathematical impossibility of them. If you took just one of these letters, and ran it through 13 cycles at the claimed response rate, you would exceed the population of the earth. Also, if you are making $50,000 (or whatever that letter claims that you will make "sharing the wealth," that means that 50,000 people had to lose $1 so that you could gain that dollar.
Now that I've given you a minimal idea of what will happen within moments of your posting a MMF chain letter, let's go on to some other things:
Thar she blows! - I've sighted a MMF scheme... so now what do I do? Take a look at some options on the What To Do About MMF page.
The Laws - the following laws are among those that cover these crimes - and are oft cited by the spammers themselves as proof that they are legal. Now you tell me, after reading United States Code, Title 18, Sections 1301, 1302, 1341, & 1343 that these are legal. If you do, I reserve the right to call you an unmitigated idiot.
In addition to the mere illegality of it, Section 1342 also makes it an additional crime punishable up to $1,000 and 5 years in prison if the person "uses or assumes, or requests to be addressed by, any fictitious, false, or assumed title, name, or address or name other than his own proper name, or takes or receives from any post office or authorized depository of mail matter, any letter, postal card, package, or other mail matter addressed to any such fictitious, false, or assumed title, name, or address, or name other than his own proper name." Read it and weep, thou pathetic attempters at remaining anonymous.
The Countries - To see a very incomplete list of countries in which it is known to be illegal to participate in one of these schemes, go to the Country List page. Please help me update this list with any information you may have.
The Scam - To see one of these highly intelligent, well thought out, perfectly legal (shyeah, right) proposals dissected with a acid keyboard, go to the MMF Dissected page. If you've passed one of these chain letters and don't like being made fun of and ridiculed, do not go to this page.
The Variations - Some of the major variants are shown here on the MMF Variant Page. Some of these are dissected as well, others will just stand on their own [lack of] merit. New material is being added constantly as people try to tweak these stupid chain letters to sound more enticing, more legitimate, or just to personalize them a little. If you've passed one of these chain letters and don't like being made fun of and ridiculed, do not go to these pages.
The Numbers - Here, you can find a couple of tables that expound the real numbers behind these scams, and what a huge drain of resources they would be if they really worked even half as well as the way the spammers claim they do.
The Reporters - If you've ever wondered "what gives these people the right?" to report and cancel these articles, you might like to take a look at this page.
The Detectives - Here are some examples of some of the methods used to track down spammers and other usenet/internet abusers as a whole (including MMF spammers). After looking at some of the examples, you may be curious about using some of the commands they used. If you have access to a shell account, or can telnet into a shell account, you can use them, too! The UNIX Manual Pages Index Page tells you what they do, and has links to the "Man Pages" (manuals) for several of the commands.
The Results - From here you can see some of the responses from ISPs about these articles that have been reported to them if you don't believe that you can lose your account. You can also peruse some of the comments from people who have enjoyed or hated my pages here.
For more general information on dealing with spam as a whole, check out Chris Lewis' FAQ on the subject.
To see a my template for response to these idiots' ISPs (and also cc:'ed to them as well if they haven't totally faked their headers in the message), go to the Response Template page. You are welcome to copy, edit, and use this template yourself. Disclaimer: I will be in no way held responsible for any action arising from your use of this template. There, that should be simple enough even for lawyers.
By the way, if you are named in one of these example pages, don't bother trying to write me and get me to remove your name or the article. You were silly/foolish/stupid/deceptive/unethical (choose any and all that fit, or add your own) enough to post it to usenet in the hopes it would be seen by lots of people. Well, you may just be getting your wish, despite the original article being long gone. Oh - threats of "I'll sue you for 'xxxx' reason." are quite comical, and I intend to add them to the roll call here. My reply to those will invariably be: "take your best shot, buddy or buddette. If you're gonna say it, you had better play it."
Here are the monthly Lupine Awards for Make Money Fast Chain Letters, as awarded by J. Porter Clark, "The Unknown News Administrator," who cancels tons of this crap...Some additional links:
This Australian site is interesting to check out. It houses a Mini-FAQ on the newsgroup alt.make.money.fast. You can also check out Yahoo! Search on Make Money Fast here.
But without question, my favorite other site is the MMF Hall of Humiliation. Be sure to check this one out, if you go nowhere else!
For a multitude of information and tools for tracking spammers, go to Julian Byrne's "Get That Spammer" page.
While it's not completely related to MMF chain letters (although a few were snagged from web pages), you may like to look at the announcement of the first Federal Trade Commission Internet Pyramid Surf Day.
Here's my "Cybersburg Address(tm)", a tribute to the nan-a.* moderators, spam cancellers, and net-abuse fighters worldwide.
The Watchdogs - If you'd like more information on the nearly tireless work that is done in the news.admin.net-abuse.* newsgroup hierarchy, you can check out the their news.admin.net-abuse.* Homepage. There you will find their charters, as well as pointers for a wealth of information on Spam in all its inglorious forms.
Just the FAQs, Ma'am - Here are some other pointers right now if you're too impatient to load their page: news.admin.net-abuse FAQ, The Cancel FAQ, the Spam Thresholds FAQ, the Figuring out fake E-Mail & Posts FAQ, The Bincancel FAQ, and the NoCeM FAQ.
If you have comments, criticisms, contributions or complaints, please feel free to send me email about these pages. I really appreciate the feed back I have gotten, and the howling screams of protest from those who have been caught and pointed towards these pages are really hilarious - they really make for fun reading.
You can send feedback to: Ken Lucke. This is the only mailto: tag I will put in these pages - I already get enough UCE, thank you very much.
All comments within these pages are offered as personal opinions only.
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