A correspondent to this website asked if he should let his elderly grandfather cash a check from one of the sweepstakes schemes we profiled. The answer is basically ‘no’. In all likelihood this is bait for a phishing scam. Or more aptly, a pigeon drop scheme. To illustrate a pigeon drop scheme, below is the text of an email I received recently:
Confirmation Reference Number: 78-45-2-12-47-66-4 You have won 1,000.000.00
pounds.contact the agency (GN FINANCE LTD) for your claims.Contact person:
Trevor Croft (Sir) with your full contact details: Name: Address: Age:
Phone: E-mail: gncfinance@gncn.net
Sincerely,
Mrs. Kimberly G Renvill.
I am plowing no new ground by disclosing that GN Finance and its related GNCN.net website is a scam. Type either into a search engine and you will see what I mean. Just to be clear, I have entered no contest with this firm, nor have I ever been in any form of previous contact with Sir Trevor Croft nor the probably fictional Mrs. Renvil. To what I would owe this phenomenal luck—announced as it was in an email without a subject line—is beyond me.
In this version of the pigeon drop, I will receive a worthless document stating that I am entitled to one million pounds (about two million American dollars) contingent upon my kicking back some sort of processing fee. The fee I send will be the only real money involved in the scheme. After I send the money in, I will discover—shock of shocks—that the certificate is worthless. I can go contact the authorities in England if I like in hopes of getting my money back, but chances are the GN Financial people are not even in England. (Unless you think of Belize aka British Honduras as England.) The GNCN.net web set up is actually Chinese.
In actuality, GN Financial doesn’t really bother with the whole pigeon drop idea. They are instead an information broker for other criminals. With the information you have provided them, they back door your credit card or bank account numbers—or apply for credit in your name. Unless they have gotten a hold of your debit card or some stored value instrument, you are unlikely to be out any real money. It is the banks and insurance companies that they are out to take.
Regardless, there’s no reason to enable criminals. So don’t.
In the case of our letter writer, it was a $60.00 check from the Guaranteed Greenbacks game run by Puzzle’s Unlimited. The writer was also quick to mention that my site was the only one that hinted something may be less than on the up and up about this game Gramps has been playing.
Before I engage in any speculation, let us deal with some cold hard facts about the Guaranteed Greenbacks game.
1. They never sent me the $6000.00 they promised me. I supposedly won and was due a check, but I never got it. I will testify to this fact under oath in court if need be.
2. The Guaranteed Greenbacks game is a test of skill, and therefore not gambling. This is a bit of a dodge on Puzzles Unlimited’s part—since gambling via the mails is a no no. The skill in this game is in the solving of some 4th grade level story problems. By rule, the winners are chosen from amongst the people who answered the question right.
Grampa has to assume that someone is silly enough to answer the problem wrong and still send the entry in with his “fee”. In reality, Gramps knows he’s playing the lottery by mail. Just like the lottery, the stakes creep up with every turn he ‘wins’.
3. Per the rules, the final authority in this game is “The Oxford Paperback Dictionary (Fourth Edition). An abridged dictionary is a curious final authority for anything.
My speculation is two fold. First, that gramps has already spent more than $60.00 in fees on the game and that the operators are kicking him some back just to keep him interested. The operators read zip codes. They know these people have friends. Having gramps come up a ‘winner’ is good advertising. Gramps and his pals might even be tempted to play in a ‘special level’ of this game for a higher fee. In even the best case scenario, gramps is getting money for a reason—and it’s not his ability to define words found in a 20 year old abridged dictionary.
In our second and worst case scenario, our operators have grown bored of operating a lottery for shut in and want to see how much gramps is worth. The check they sent is good. Once they get a copy of the cashed check back, they will have (1) a replica of your grandfather’s signature and (2) his bank account number. They can then go print themselves up some of gramps checks and make a few purchases.
I am sad to say that option two is more likely than option one. Games of skill involving 4th Grade academic skills only exist on network television. Guaranteed Greenbacks is clearly targeted at the elderly—which is sadly who most scams pick on.
Like GN Financial, my speculation is that Puzzles Unlimited is running a phishing game and not a pigeon drop. In phishing, the objective is to turn information into cash. Only a bold criminal is going to use gramp’s information to print up checks himself. Most of the time the information is wholesaled to confederates, who attempt to make as much use of it as they can as fast as they can.
As careful as I am, I have had my card hacked. Thankfully fraud detection has come a long way. But why open the door?
Not only have strange things come in my inbox over the past few months, but some very odd things have passed by my eyes. One of our beats is the magazine business, specifically the seedy side of it. While we have been covering the near death of True Story (and her sisters, the last of the pulps) and Newsweek (once a scare pulp and now the GREATEST MAGAZINE EVER), the passing of an age has transpired without much notice…
Soap Opera Digest
The magazine's future has been ruined by two trends. The first is the number of cancellations of soap operas. Long-lived shows which include "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" have been canceled and replaced by talk shows, which are less expensive to air. The other insurmountable challenge is the wide availability of details on soap operas online. Some of the shows even have their own fan sites. News about the industry, in other words, is now distributed and no longer in one place. Soap Opera Digest's first quarter advertising pages fell 21% in the first quarter and revenue was down 18% to $4 million. In 2000, the magazine's circulation was in excess of 1.1 million readers. By 2005 it fell below 500,000 where it has remained for the last 5 years. Source Interlink Media, the magazine's parent, which also owns automotive, truck, and motorcycle publications, has little reason to support a product based on a dying industry.
This is from a web thingy about things we should say good bye to during the coming year. Although I think Soap Opera Digest and her sisters are hopelessly toast, I think that the Soap Opera as a form is not going to vanish.
Girls like it too much. It’s like romance novels. The people who read them really like them. And the women who like soaps really like them. Like the novels, which are headed head long to kindle land, I think the soaps have a chance to mutate. Some of them have come back as reruns.
Before I go on and on prognosticating about their future, let me cite up front that it’s a no brainer. Since their introduction in the 1930s, the serial daily melodrama as a form has gone on to conquer all cultures with any type of access to media. In Argentina, before they had radios in widespread use, photo comic books of soap operas were in wide circulation. Their spawn, the Mexican comic book, is still popular today. Broadcast soap operas today are popular in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, in India and in Latin America. The United States will not be alone and soap opera-less for long.
True, we have made our women wage slaves and robbed them of what little me time they have. But I don’t see the unique fix that a soap opera brings actually being supplanted by other forms. The first person who can deliver the girls their stories in some modern way will have a fortune on his hands.
Advertising supported streaming media comes to mind. Since I am a game designer, I will put it in terms of an interactive face book type game.
It’s not a role playing game, but rather a game like environment. In this environment, various different parts of the story line are unfolding. Our player moves around the environment, snooping from place to place. It’s something our girl can drop into during her free time at work and take in in dribs and drabs. The environment has effectively three days worth of action emplaced, with a new day being added and an old one being dropped every day. A specific story arc may have three scenes in the environment, each taking place in different venues. Each scene runs three to five minutes. The arc’s daily contribution will be fifteen minutes. And there are several arcs running each day. Total new programming per day might start at 45 minutes and then telescope to 90 minutes, depending on popularity of the backdrop. The trick, as with all soap operas, is in either having novel scenes and/or making all of the arcs relate to each other.
The intent of the design is that it is something that you can leave and come back to.
Advertising supported podcast. Delivered in the daily email to your ipad/listening device. It’s essentially a radio show in twenty minute installments. Given how popular books on tape are, I am surprised this one hasn’t got up and running before. All this needs to get off the ground is making people aware of it.
In the near term, I can see it becoming a staple of basic cable or even free tv again. How many hour of original broadcasting is your average cable station really putting out there? You run three or four shows back to back all around the clock. If they can’t catch it, they will tivo it. On the other hand, if this strategy really worked, it would have saved the shows that were on the air.
Which brings me to the last mutation: have the things have a set lifespan. It’s a mini series. You have to watch it because it will go away. I think that the static nature of the American version of the soap opera was really its undoing. A deliberately shorter run form might have more traction with the modern audience.
Next Post: More Internet In-Bin Featuring New American Heroes, President Obama as the luckiest politician on Earth, Bad Guy Publishers Sinking to New Lows and News on the enigmatic Electricar
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