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Make Money Fast (stylised as MAKE.MONEY.FAST) is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".
The original "Make Money Fast" letter was written around 1988 by a person who used the name Dave Rhodes. Biographical details are not certain, and it is not clear if this was even the person's actual name. The letter encouraged readers of the email to forward one dollar in cash to a list of people provided in the text, and to add their own name and address to the bottom of the list after deleting the name and address at the top. [1] Using the theory behind pyramid schemes, the resulting chain of money flowing back and forth would supposedly deliver a reward of thousands of dollars to the ones participating in the chain, as copies of their chain spread and more and more people sent one dollar to their address.
According to the FAQ of the net.legends Usenet news group, Dave Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University), a Seventh-day Adventist college in Maryland, who wrote the letter and uploaded it as a text file to a nearby BBS around 1987. [2] The earliest posting to Usenet was posted by a David Walton in 1989, also using a Columbia Union College account. Walton referred to himself as, "BIZMAN DAVE THE MODEM SLAVE", and referred to "Dave Rhodes" in his post. [3] The true identity of Dave Rhodes has not been found. A supposed self-published web site by Dave Rhodes was found to be fake. [4] [5]
The scam was forwarded over e-mail and Usenet. By 1994 "Make Money Fast" became one of the most persistent spams with multiple variations. [6] [7] The chain letters follow a rigidly predefined format or template with minor variations (such as claiming to be from a retired lawyer or claiming to be selling "reports" in order to attempt to make the scheme appear lawful). They quickly became repetitive, causing them to be bait for widespread satire or parody. One widespread parody begins with the subject of, "GET.ARRESTED.FAST" and the line, "Hi, I'm Dave Rhodes, and I'm in jail". [8] Another parody sent around in academic circles is, "Make Tenure Fast", substituting the sending of money to individuals on a list with listing journal citations. [9]
The text of the letter originally claimed this practice is "perfectly legal", citing Title 18, Sections 1302 & 1341 of the postal lottery laws. [1] The U.S. Postal Inspection Service cites Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302 when it asserts the illegality of chain letters, including the "Make Money Fast" scheme: [10]
There's at least one problem with chain letters. They're illegal if they request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants. Chain letters are a form of gambling, and sending them through the mail (or delivering them in person or by computer, but mailing money to participate) violates Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute (Chain letters that ask for items of minor value, like picture postcards or recipes, may be mailed, since such items are not things of value within the meaning of the law).
It also asserts that, "Regardless of what technology is used to advance the scheme, if the mail is used at any step along the way, it is still illegal." [10] The U.S. Postal Inspection Service asserts the mathematical impossibility that all participants will be winners, as well as the possibilities that participants may fail to send money to the first person listed, and the perpetrator may have been listed multiple times under different addresses and names, thus ensuring that all the money goes to the same person. [10]
In recent years, one avenue that spammers have used to circumvent the postal laws, is to conduct business by non-postal routes, such as sending an email message and instructing recipients to send money via electronic services such as PayPal. While the specific laws mentioned above will only be violated if regular postal mail is used at some point during the process of communication, [11] the sending of chain letters is often prohibited by the terms of service and/or user agreements of many email providers, and can result in an account being suspended or revoked. [12] [13]
Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
A letter is a written message conveyed from one person to another through a medium. Something epistolary means that it is a form of letter writing. The term usually excludes written material intended to be read in its original form by large numbers of people, such as newspapers and placards, although even these may include material in the form of an "open letter". The typical form of a letter for many centuries, and the archetypal concept even today, is a sheet of paper that is sent to a correspondent through a postal system. A letter can be formal or informal, depending on its audience and purpose. Besides being a means of communication and a store of information, letter writing has played a role in the reproduction of writing as an art throughout history. Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. Historians Herodotus and Thucydides mention and use letters in their writings.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.
A chain letter is a message that attempts to convince the recipient to make a number of copies and pass them on to a certain number of recipients. The "chain" is an exponentially growing pyramid that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
news.admin.net-abuse.email is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of the abuse of email systems, specifically through email spam and similar attacks. According to a timeline compiled by Keith Lynch, news.admin.net-abuse.email was the first widely available electronic forum for discussing spam.
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.
Address munging is the practice of disguising an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.
A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Email fraud is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual using email as the vehicle. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people, just as telephony and paper mail were used by previous generations.
The Lumber Cartel was a facetious conspiracy theory popularized on USENET that claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies.
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
SORBS is a list of e-mail servers suspected of sending or relaying spam. It has been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users.
A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam.
Chris Lewis is a Canadian security consultant from Ottawa, who fought spam on Usenet and the early Internet. Active in volunteer anti-spam efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis was described in Net.wars (1997) as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" at the time. In April 1998, he organized an unsuccessful moratorium with forty other anti-spam volunteers in an attempt to boycott internet service providers into doing their share against spam. He worked as a systems architect for Nortel and, as of 2017, is Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology.
The term list poisoning refers to poisoning an e-mail mailing list with invalid e-mail addresses.
Backscatter is incorrectly automated bounce messages sent by mail servers, typically as a side effect of incoming spam.
The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.
The article states that Purvis died in 1955, while Wikipedia's article on Melvin Purvis places the year of his death at 1960.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)A Copy of the original letter.
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