They come in all shapes, sizes and flavors, folks!

All highly distasteful and all highly illegal

Click here to see one I call the "$1 Concept Explained Without the Hype & Silly Numbers" variant, because that's the way this person starts out - telling us that he's going to explain it much more clearly because he is leaving all the hype and numbers out. He then proceeds to hype the scheme, and ends up rattling off a bunch of the (wrong as usual) numbers anyway.

This one I call the "I found It!!!" variant #1 (there are several of these). I got a reply to my standard template from the poster on this one if you want to read it.

I've named this one "The Way Of Life" variant, but you can call it "Summer Camp" if you want. It's short - which is its only redeeming quality, of course.

Here we have the "Legal Questions Addressed" version of this wonderful little scam, where the author shows us just how legal it really is with his persuasive argument.

Now here's a little gem I call the "Sob Story" variant - and his reply to me. In his article, he starts out by telling us how abused he was as an employee. (::sniff:: ::sniff:: ::boo-hoo::) This one also adds an additional person to the list, making it 6, and also claims a hefty 7.5% return rate on posts, working his numbers to show that you can make $863,615 in this little number. Heck, for that, I might even try it! Where do I sign up? Oh, that's right, on the next one...

... who even was so kind as to include a form to fill out and send with your dollar. (Now why didn't I think of that, it makes it so much easier, this is bound to work now.) I call this one (understandably) "The Form Letter" variant.

Now here's a nasty one that purports to be from a lawyer who fixed all the illegalities, and made over 3.25 million dollars in two runnings of this scam. You can call this one "The Lawyer" variant (if you can keep from either laughing yourself to death, or gagging yourself unconscious, that is). You could also call it the "Universal Law of Abundance" variant, because he makes some claim that this is in accordance with that [unknown] law. There are some very nasty little details about this one. The "Sob Story" variant above and this one appear to be cousins due to the 6 people and 7.5% returns claimed.

Check this one out and see why I call it "The Rambler" variant. We can be assured many times in this one that we are legitimate and we are investing our money wisely to start an "Order Service Company." Oh, yes, I'm convinced.

Here is the "Short `n' Sweet" variant, where they at least make no effort to explain it, which is in and of itself a redeeming quality.

In this one, the spammer seems to be a little confused about where he lives and the appropriate currency, not to mention the puzzling phrase "piece of paper." I call it "The Case of the Mysterious Money" variant.

This "Christian Gift Exchange" variant is a very disgusting variation which purports to be some sort of Christian Charity program. It is a very Un-Christian scam which you need to have strong nerves to even read.

Time to lighten up a little bit - this one is a parody on the whole schmeer - using DOGS, no less! Have a laugh at the "Dog Parody."

This one is just brimming with Testimonials as to the efficiency of this scheme. You just can't help but believe after all these heartfelt true stories of wealth generated. Or can you?

1 Jan 1996 - Here's one I call "The Detective Game," not from anything in the spam, but rather because I show a little about how to track these suckers down. This one used several faked headers, but still could not hide from someone who knows what to look for.

2 Jan 1997 - This one is "The Total Idiot" You actually have to see this one to believe it.

2 Jan 1997 - Yes, folks, it's even international. Have you been brushing up on your Italian lessons? Try a trip to "Little Italy" and see if you can correctly guess the content of this posting. Yes, that's right, you win both the three piece lounge suite and a large pizza of your choice.

3 Jan 1997 - Here‘s a whole new twist - "The Lottery Ticket" variant, where you don't send money - you send lottery tickets. If only the Lottery had these odds for real... Of course, then THEY'd be broke instead of the spammers. The pertinent laws have now been linked to this page.

14 Jan 1997 - Well. I found a couple of new variants today - and I was beginning to think that I had run out of material to pick apart. Needless to say, that probably won't happen. Unfortunately. Here are the No Paragraphs variant and the Two Things You Should Know Up Front variant, both of which I ran into in the same newsgroup in the same pass.

16 Jan 1997 - I have to admit an error. I thought that the guy in The Total Idiot variant above was about as stupid as you can get, but I was wrong. This guy takes the Really Total Idiot award. This is another one you just have to see to believe.

18 Jan 1997 - Here's the $2 Variant, in which you can save a little money (or run the scam two and a half times for the same amount), and yet make even more money. In this one you only send $2 to the first person (or is that the top two people - she seems to be a little confused as to which it is) of 4 on the list.

20 Jan 1997 - As a companion to our first foreign entry, Little Italy (above), here's theFrench Connection, which tries to make a game out of the whole thing

27 Jan 1997 - And as another companion to our first two foreign entries above, here's the Dinero Rapido variant, which, although a real load of bull, will never make it into the ring.

27 Jan 1997 - Here's the MLM Reports variant (Also known as the "4 Reports" variant), which gives you the "opportunity of a lifetime" to learn highly technical details and analysis of the Multi-Level Marketing business.

28 Jan 1997 - It must be foreign week... In addition to the French and Spanish versions above, I picked up a Japanese version (which I have yet to figure out how to display properly (maybe a series of .GIF renditions of the japanese characters), and a Portugese version kindly donated by a news administrator. I'm probably going to have to start a whole section devoted just to them.

30 Jan 1997 - Continuing with our foreign guest appearances is the Hungarian Dictionary variant, kindly donated by J Porter Clark, who cancels these articles with alarming frequency.

5 Feb 1997 - It's been a slow week coming up with new variants. Not that it has been slow coming up with the slime itself. Just look here for a report of almost 50,000 cancellations (just by J Porter Clark) of these articles for January (and see his new "Lupine Awards for MMF"). However, we did come in with a new variant, finally - I picked this one up in the news.admin.net-abuse.usenet area from someone else reporting it. I call it the Loan Summation variant. Also this last week, the entry jockying for position known as the Pyramid to Success variant. It's merely a re-editing of The Lawyer version above, though.

27 Feb 1997 - I've been kind of lax about putting up new variations on this little scam, as I have seen from the hit counters that the variant pages have not been visited as often as I would have thought they were. So I am just putting a bunch up as a lump rather than trying to put them up as they come in. Today, I am putting three new versions up... The World Traveller variant, the Debtor's Prison variant, and the Friendly Bet variant.

1 Mar 1997 -The latest Lupine Awards for MMF for the month of February are in, and you can see that over 42,000 articles were cancelled just by J Porter Clark alone.

9 August 1997 - OK, it's pretty obvious I haven't done anything with this site for a while - I have been busy on other projects, and have not had the time to add all the new variants out there. The Lawyer variant caught on big time, and with some minor sub-variations has been a clear winner of late in the percentage of use, although clearly not in intelligence. I do have them all saved, though, and now that I am moving this site to my anti-net-abuse site, www.stopspam.org (one of those projects I was mentioning) I will be getting back to working on it, and perhaps revamping it a bit. Bear with me.

12 October 1997 - Well, I've been ignoring this section of my pages for long enough. I have built up quite a collection of idiotic variants, so I will start putting them up again. The first one is one I call the Kick Financial Butt variant, and it's a lulu. It even goes so far as to quote these very pages [actually, the old MMF Myth Pages url] as justification that this little scam is legal (yes, folks, this MMF spammer quotes the MMF Myth Pages. Now, do you suppose that he actually read any of these pages????). All I can say is that if he did, his comprehension level is somewhat below average. For a dead vole, that is.

15 January 1998 - Whoops, it's been a long time, I guess. I better get caught up. I've been too busy whack-a-mole'ing spammers lately. Anyway, I decided I needed to finally put up PC-SUPER-MLM variant, which is just a disk based version of the "4 Reports" or "MLM Reports" version above. As people have caught on to the fact that it is nothingmore than a chain letter, other PC-SUPER- programs have arisen from the coffins of scammers' minds - PC-SUPER-GOLD, PC-SUPER-PARTNER, PC-SUPER-GENIUS (and its Spanish version, PC-SUPER-GENIO), PC-SUPER-ADVERTISER, etc., etc., etc. They're all illegal, all a scam, and all will land you in jail if the authorities decide they want to press charges.

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  © 1997 Ken Lucke - all rights reserved