A Scam for every generation

The young ones, they know it all. Another generation goes out ready to face the world, they don’t need advice, they don’t want the benefit of our experience, and once again, just like us a decade ago, they get scammed, taken to the cleaners and ripped off.

It happens to every generation, in a slightly different form, if there’s one thing that I can assure you that will happen to my children, is that they will get scammed. Naive and ready to part with their money for a fairy tale without a moments thought, or with too much intension to get rich quick, it will happen to them.

This might help you with watch to watch out for…

Not so long ago it was pyramid schemes, wonderful plans that you get in on the ground floor of a business, for nothing more than buying some product and selling it at a profit. For this the person that got you in on it also got a cut, and all the way up the chain. So the deal was not to sell product, but to get other distributors in on the game, selling for you and helping you with you wealth. And this is the scam, the sales pitch does not tell you the real part of the story, your lured in with cheap wholesale product but then realise you don’t have the skills to pull in people and manage groups and motivate people. Your the sucker that bought product and helped the chain make money.

That was one I first knew about, well the first one I participated in, before that I guess there where a few actually. The first was the products on the back of comic books and magazines. Wondrous x-ray specks, itching powder and cigarette gags (yes, when I was 5), spud guns, magic tricks and all other items that for a few cents I could mail order. A few cents took me weeks to save back then, and for the delivery fee the letter was sent. I don’t remember now how many I got back, some worked (the spud gun) and some were probably dangerous (cigarette bombs and itching powder) and the x-ray specks was once owned by every 6 year old boy at one stage, and they never worked.

We learned from this, slowly, but the thrill and the prize got bigger and the efforts attracted us back. In my teens I got a letter, promising that if I sent a few one dollar bills to the people on the enclosed list, thousands would be my reward. It looked like it made sense, but this was my first experience with pyramid schemes, and like the rest it failed, mostly because my parents saved me from wasting my time on this one.

But it never stopped, companies keep finding new ways to avoid the laws and push crap, spam and scams to us. For a while it was the stock market boom, get in and do your own trading, the Internet lets you buy and sell your own shares, make money now, and of course, here’s a nice expensive course to learn how to do it, and when you trade, each time you trade, even if you trade a few dollars we take a cut. They didn’t actually care if you did well or not, so long as you traded, as often as possible.

Then here in Australia, they de-registered the energy supply companies. This allowed any supplier to do the charges while one central organisation actually put in the cables and lines to supply the juice. Great, now we have some 15 companies pushing for our service, not one of them provide any benefit to the market, there is no competition, other than that of knocking on our door and calling us to tell us about their great service. Yes, they knock on your door, ask you if you are concerned about the environment and then precede to tell you and shame you into thinking they will do a better job at protecting the environment on their behalf simply out of them being your selected agent.

I got a fax machine one day, and a special fax line for my new business, and I registered that number with a few places, ready to do my work. Within 24 hours I got my first fax..
"The prince has been exiled from his country Nigeria and needs you to help with some large funds he has to move out of the country…" Yes I saw it, a scam, my first fax on my new machine was dodgy. I found more than two years later a very astute business family received a similar offer, and were very serious about pursuing it. It is amazing how greed motivates somebody into believing that these things are true.

The same thing now happens with telco’s. Buy our phone, net, 3g, adsl, cable tv bundle package at so many dollars a month and get so many hundreds of dollars of value each and every month. Contract lock in for 24 to 48 months (in find print) and then after 3 weeks you know you bought crap and you don’t need it and you can’t even use it, if it works properly and you have wasted you money. But that’s fine because in 2 years there is another bunch of new home owners ready to sign up and keep it all going along.

Now that you have your mobile phone, and the cable tv you have is boring and the internet connection isn’t working you see an add telling you to get some free wallpaper and ringtones for your mobile. It’s too good to be true, and it is. For those without good big plasma tv’s the find print states that you are subscribing to their service at so many dollar per message, and a few or many message per week.

We have gone full circle, back to the crap on the back of comic book, now pushed to you through your tv and charged through your mobile phone account. I can tell you that the value in your phone plan wont cover the costs of getting all those crappy ring tones and the bill will be a challenge to pay the same week as your home lone ends it’s honeymoon rate.

If your not yet convinced, look at emails. they have pushed every scam there is to be had, large penises they stay hard forever and other products that will never arrive at your door, but you will see money taken from your credit card with little or no recourse. And here too they push stocks, the email sent around inflates the price and the scammer sells the stock, so what happens to you?

So don’t do it, if it sounds too good to be true then it is. You will likely get bitten by this at least once, so make it a small one and move on smarter and wiser for next time. You will find though that the sales pitch does not discuss what’s being sold, watch out for free stuff that comes with a subscription, be careful of the honeymoon rates and extreme caution when passing on your bank details.

On the other side, if you have a good scam and you push it to enough people it will probably work. There are plenty of dumb people out there born every

day, and they are ready to part with their money for the promise of endless fun and wealth.

Will you be next?