Money for nothing, Messages $3 a pop! Mobile message scam!
Was surfing the web tonight and I think I was an AFL forum site when I saw an ad for a Sports Quiz site. I naturally thought the worst and wasn’t let down. The ad was for an Australian domain and I thought why not click the ad, charge them up for the ad and see if it is as bad as I thought. It was. It was probably worst.
Surprise, Surprise when I hit the site, it was for an SMS competition. There seems to be a lot of these around at the moment and in my opinion they are a disgrace. Basically most of them are flashy and for a prize (often some piece of technology like an iPod or a xBox or Playstion, etc) some times money but the kicker is that they charge you extra money over the normal cost of an SMS message for each message. Some times this is each message sent and received but normally its just each message received. And when I say extra cost I am not talking 1 or 2 cents, not 10 or 20 cents. I am talking in this case $3 per message.
Not only that, but in this case, they guarantee at least on message a day. More if you reply. So thats at least 90-93 a month worth of cost. The prize in this case is is $500 and if you read the rules its the person with the most points meaning answering one question right a day is probably not going to cut it. So the more someone else spends, the less you end up winning.
So surely no-one would be silly enough to go through with this, right? Wrong. Lets just look at the published figures on their site and at the top scorer, RickeyS. RickeyS has got a points total of 399800. Here’s a break down of what that means:
- Questions answered correctly: 15992
- Cost of questions answered correctly: $47976
- Assuming 30 questions a month, how many months worth of questions: 533 months
- Assuming that he won ever month, how many months worth of wins to recoup his money: 96 months (or 8 years straight).
Now this is just one guy (assuming this guy really exists) and the other thing is that this assumes that he answered all his questions correctly. If he got questions wrong then the figures would rise. Why would anyone be so silly to be caught in this sort of trap? Please be careful out there people and don’t encourage these parasites on humanity!
Molly
Technorati : AFL, Mobile, SMS, SMS Message, Scam, Sports Quiz, competition, rickeyS
Ice Rocket : AFL, Mobile, SMS, SMS Message, Scam, Sports Quiz, competition, rickeyS
