MMF Madness

The initials alone should scare you. It evokes memories of cult comic books such as Tales from the Crypt, where the hapless heroine, hog-tied and gagged, strains against the bindings, uttering, "Mmmf…!"

Perhaps it brings to mind a more pedestrian epithet. Whatever the case, Make Money Fast schemes abound. The gullibility of humans is actually a commodity. Scammers, spammers and scum-sucking bottom feeders trade shares of naïveté on the open markets of HYIP and AFF(419). I tried to warn people but, I realize that the best way to learn that fire is hot is to fry your fingers. So here are some "hot tips" for you:

* What Happened to 12DailyPro, Anyway? "I told you so" doesn't do justice to the topic of this classic Ponzi scheme. Stick this in your Google pipe and smoke it: "12dailypro investigation"
* DEAR SIR/MADAM URGENT! Dear friend, Firstly, I'm soliciting your utmost confidentiality in this email.

I need your help to move a large sum from the National Bank of Incredulity.

Here's your burn cream: www.mmfhoh.org (MMF Hall of Humiliation) has a great collection of scams. Another site, http://419eater.com (419 Eater), has some of the most hilarious accounts of average people fighting back against the so-called Nigerian Scam. The site is named 419 after the section of the Nigerian penal code that deals with Advance Fee Fraud cases.

Multi-Level Marketing Madness

There is a particularly nasty crust of filth in the bellybutton of the web. I've scraped out a bit of this malodorous goop and placed it under the microscope. Here is what I found:

* Business Opportunity "Reviews" I will not dignify the following sites with an active link.
1. Whoever put up www.mlmscamzone.com and mlmscampolice.com claims to have bought into so many MLM opportunities that he or she can now pass judgment and declare the "best opportunity". The problem is that these two sites are exactly the same, except for the affiliate link, which appears to be auto-rotated.
2. www.chasefreedom.com buys a lot of pay per click ads for diet-related businesses. Each page talks about the targeted company.

At the end of each "review" is an affiliate link to the "Highest Reviewed" diet. I don't know what yardstick was used, because the only place I could find a rating was on the page that "reviews" the so-called best diet!

While the program being touted may be decent, a website masquerading as an unbiased source of information is just crusty. The right way to do this is to provide content, interspersed with affiliate links and full disclosure.
* Real Life Daubers I spoofed an MLM in Awesome Business Opportunity. It was based on my experience with a company that created and sold "collectibles". I argued with two associates who were trying their best to recruit me. I couldn't grasp the compensation plan.

Remember the good old days? You bought inventory wholesale, sold it retail, paid your bills from the revenue and counted your profits? Well, here's a twist: you buy stuff at retail, then trick your friends into buying the same stuff. If you trick enough people, the company will reward you with some kind of digital bonus card. There's lots of vague references to money, but never mind that; your job is to keep buying stuff to remain eligible to trick more people.

The product is never something that is easy to sell (that is one of the "tests" for a business opportunity: can the product be purchased at Wal-Mart?) In this company, you were encouraged to buy hundreds of dollars of nouveau art from unknown artists. By limiting the production runs, the company hoped to create "demand" for the art. The stock market analogy was carried to an extreme: twice a year, the company held conventions during which the associates could buy, sell and traded their paintings.

The company's fatal flaw was that it was headquartered in the state of Texas. Texas law entitles consumers to return MLM products for up to a year. Somewhere along the line, something must have happened to the associates' expectations.

Dissatisfied customers made a run on the company's coffers, demanding refunds for all the art they couldn't sell. The company crashed and burned into Chapter 7 history.

No burn cream for you, here. Tread lightly in the MLM world.

More than Traffic Madness

Saving the worst for last, morethantraffic.com is the ultimate scam. Create a professional looking website. Imply that you have had wild success in the xxx industry and have decided to share your technology with the rest of the world. Then, disguise the fact that you're really just repackaging a common service and selling it at a usurious mark-up.

It helps if you really have had this success, because the sharp people are going to try to verify it.

With bona fides in hand, you just have to convince prospects that you won't take any of their profits until they reach $100,000 in sales from the targeted traffic you're going to send to them. Bolster this with a fake survey of their website and tell them that 12,788 people are ready to buy their product right now, fool!