04.24.07

Spam, Content Theft Plagues Blogs

Posted in Legal Issues, News and Announcements at 5:58 by lnxwalt

If you have done many Web searches lately, you have seen dozens or hundreds of spam blogs that pop up during your searches. Recently, I was searching on a blog search site for information on a particular topic and had to wade through about five pages of “splogs” (spam blogs) before I found the first results. They do this because they are looking for “easy money.”

You know, the same thing that is offered on those late-night infomercials: send us a few hundred dollars and you can make $5,000 per day sitting around in your underwear. No more getting up in the morning, showering and shaving, wearing the accepted clothing for your industry, and getting on the freeway. No more boss telling you to stop lollygagging. Become an overnight millionaire on the Internet!

If you are not reading this article through your feed reader or on our site, you are probably seeing stolen content. If so, please click on the “Goooogle” link and report the site you see this content on. I believe it violates the terms of Google Adsense to completely duplicate existing content.

The thing is, this is not anything new. One of the reasons that e-mail and IM are getting clogged with spam and “spim” is because companies see a way to send out millions of advertisements at almost zero marginal cost. If even 1/10 of 1% of the targeted people respond with clicks (or worse yet, purchases), the spammers make money.

Before that, it was junk mail to postal mail boxes. Send out a few thousand advertisements and if you get a 1% or 2% response, you’re making money. Especially since “bulk” mailers get frequent-customer discounts from the Postal Service. Isn’t it nice that I pay full price when I send real mail, some of which goes to subsidize the people that send me junk mail that I have to throw out each day.

We get the scams where someone is trying to sneak money out of their country. These things are not new. There were other ways that they tried to get you to hand over cash in exchange for an expected jackpot.

We get the chain letter that promises wealth if we forward and poverty if we do not. But again, these things are not new. Except back in the pre-networked world, these things were typed up and duplicated and you were actually supposed to send cash to one of the previous recipients.

Some time back, I had sent for some information from one of those wholesalers that have the “start a business plan.” I already knew what I wanted to do, but I was willing to look at other options. After a wait that was so long I had nearly forgotten I had sent for it, I got a packet a couple of weeks ago. The packet was long on “sign up NOW and start making the money you’ve dreamed of making” and short on details like what you’d be doing in order to make the money. Then today, I got a telephone call from a salesman, a very rude and pushy salesman, a very rude and pushy salesman who let me know that I wasted his time and money by sending for information without being convinced to purchase their plan. After that, they could have said, “we’ll send you all the gold in Ft. Knox and you don’t have to pay us anything,” I would still have nothing to do with them. So then I checked on Rip-Off Reports and there they were, with a long page full of complaints and some vehement defenders who could easily have been employees.

As I said, there is nothing new there. I first became aware of this kind of behavior–something for nothing–while reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Later, I read about FBI and Secret Service agents and the founding of those agencies, which was heavy on various something-for-nothing scams that have been pulled over the years. (As a child, I probably read more in two weeks than I currently read in a year.)

I recommend that you check out White Collar Fraud before investing in any kind of business.

Aside from that, do not contribute to the continued existence of the something-for-nothing fraudsters. You do this by refusing to buy from spam that you receive and by refusing to join the “we’ll make your rich overnight” plans. If their product or service really made people rich, do you think they would be sharing it? I mean, come on. One of the richest guys in the world regularly gets in trouble because his company tries to put its competitors out of business. So there is no way to convince me that someone who had a fool-proof, easy-to-follow cash-generation system would sell it to outsiders for a few hundred dollars each. It would be locked up under guard somewhere in the inventor’s underground vault.

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