Clay Olbon II <clay.olbon@dynetics.com> writes:
It seems that pyramid scheme spamming has increased of late (if that is possible!). In my lifetime, I can only remember a single snail-mail instance of a pyramid scheme - over the net it is an entirely different story (although the number of instances is probably proportional to the number of lists I subsribe to).
I once received a paper version of the Craig Shergold spam (i.e. a solicitation of business cards to be sent to the dying boy without any computer networks being involved) and became curious and looked into why people spread these memes. It turned out that there's a substantial number of people involved in marketing/public relations who sort of stay in touch by forwarding these memes, good luck chain letters, multi-level marketing/ pyramid schemes etc to each other. The MMF spam we see on the net is a vague echo of the MMF spam moving around USPS, with real cash. Fortunately most folks involved in this have been too clueless to use the 'net or we'd see a lot more of it. I suppose if it ever becomes cost-effective to use digital cash and the Internet for MMF, they'll do it. Thus far putting MMF on the 'net generally results in the loss of any accounts mentioned in the spam, so getting cash via USPS is much more effective. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps