Autosurf and makes millions! No, really!

(originally posted somewhere else January 21, 2006)

If you've ever looked for work at home opportunities, you've no doubt seen ads for programs where you can make money autosurfing. I have checked out a few of these sites in order to see if the programs were what I thought they were, and sure enough - invest some money, turn your computer on, let it surf to a few pages, and make money. It's THAT EASY! You'd have to be a fool not to sign up, right?

Right?

Frankly, I can't believe people are doing this. After a little more surfing I found a site put together by a person who was seriously promoting a program I've seen several times, and was stunned by what it had to say. I'm not going to post the site url because I don't want to encourage these fools, but if you really want to check it out, send me your e-mail address. Here it is:

Please take 5 minutes & read this article - you won't regret it; big money is inevitable. We've all heard the "Make big money easy" sales pitches and I've always thought "BS" until now. Here's the gist of it: surf a few web pages a day & get paid big. The basic process is this:

1) Create a xxxxxxxxxxx Account

2) Create a xxxxxxxxx Account

3) Invest money to your xxxxxxxxxxx(funded with xxxxx)

4) Surf 12 web pages per day for 12 days

5) Get paid 144% of your investment

My first thoughts when I heard this were "This is too good to be true." After hours of research, I figured out exactly how this company makes its money to pay you 144% interest over 12 days. They have multiple revenue streams:

1) New members - when a new member deposits money, this money is used to pay out interest to existing members

2) Members who sign up & don't surf 12 pages for 12 days -
when somebody does not meet this criteria, they end up losing their
money. These losses go to pay out interest to existing member.

3) People buying advertisements for the 12 pages you surf - When
you surf, you are on a website for 25 seconds & then directed to
the next website. A lot of people will get up & walk away while
this happens. However, a certain number of people will sit & view
those pages. If they see something interesting, they click to the
advertisers' websites. While this percent is much smaller than
traditional advertising, there is still some value to it (paid to 12
Daily Pro, and ultimately to you).

Basically, all you have to do is deposit money, surf 12 pages per day for 12 days, and receive 144% returns. You can start with depositing as little as $6 or as much as $6000.

OK - go back up and look at #1. There's a name for this type of arrangement - it's called a Ponzi, or Pyramid, scheme:

An illegal investment scheme in which investors are promised impossibly high returns on their investments. These are scams in which money from later investors is used to pay earlier investors. The creators of the scheme get most of the profits while those who come later are left with nothing because there are eventually an insufficient number of new investors to pay the existing ones. These scams inevitably collapse because they require exponential growth in the number of participants at each step, which is impossible.

Maybe the person who wrote the article is wrong about how members get paid, but if not - wow. Unethical and completely illegal.

But beyond that, it's just not cool. Creating a website takes time and effort, and if people are investing more and more to differentiate their sites so that they can get the attention of someone who is autosurfing and only gets to see their site for a second (if they're even sitting there and didn't turn it on and leave the room), then at some point the cost of that advertising filters down to all of us as the ultimate purchasers of any product with a a website. Autosurfing seems like it creates an artificial hype for a site.

And finally - the returns. 144% in 12 days? If this was possible, the entire world financial market would simply shut down and everyone would just turn on their computers. Wall Street would turn into a strip mall so we could all spend our 144%-in-12-days profits on truck loads of Prada shoes - except that we couldn't actually buy anything because there wouldn't be anyone actually working in those shops, they'd all be home autosurfing, and we couldn't order them on the internet because no UPS driver with half a brain would bust his ass making deliveries anymore if there was a fortune to be made watching websites flip by every 25 seconds. Indeed, there wouldn't be any websites flipping by after a while since there's no real point in creating a product for people to buy, it takes a lot of time and effort and heart to create a business giving back fairly little in return compared to 144% in 12 days.

I'm sure these programs will always be around, but I'll just never quite understand how folks can rationalize taking advantage of those folks who are desperate enough to give them a shot.