Seven Sins for Seven Virtures

Charity vs. Greed

There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world today, whether it is from personal strife or environmental disasters.  In my hometown while I was growing up we used to have a yearly telethon devoted to the Heart Fund Association.  It was a pledge drive led by a local reverend by the name of Hart.  Ironic, huh?  From what I remember, a weekend was devoted to the telethon and our local public access channel broadcast all the goings on that were happening down at the fire hall in town.  There were variety acts and other assorted activities devoted to getting viewers to pick up their phone and pledge money towards a good cause.  I even wanted to get in on the act and told my parents that I wanted to donate $5.00.  I had a dual purpose.   One was to do a good thing.  The other was so that I could hear my name as they read the list of donators.  Even at an early age, I wanted my 15 minutes of fame.  The point is that this was a very small operation limited to the viewing area in and around my town.  The outside world did not have much of an opportunity to give there hearts, as it were, for a worthy cause.

Today, a worthy cause is just a click away.  Hurricane relief, Tsunami relief, 9/11, you name it; everyone has a need for donations.  And it's not to say that any of those are a worthwhile cause.  In fact, had it not been for the Internet, a substantial portion of donations to those causes would never have materialized or would take months to tabulate and account for in their books.   Having a link set up on the web reaches an unlimited amount of people with little work to be done other than account management, search optimization, and advertising.   And it doesn't have to be just about donating to disaster relief funds or impoverished areas.  There are worthwhile causes all over the internet just waiting for your charity dollars to help them meet their goal.   Even eBay has the ability to designate, organize, and promote listings that help raise money for worthy causes.

However, for every website that implores you for donations to help natural disaster victims, there are more devoted to bilking your kind heart of money for their own personal gain.  For every animal shelter that promotes their participation in a contest to get a million dollars for renovations and operating capital, another website offers to sell you pug puppies from Africa real cheap because some doctor had to relocate and couldn't keep them.  You pay the money and the dogs mysteriously become held up in customs and you need to pay more money and, well, you get the picture.    For every State's Treasury Department website that helps people reclaim lost earnings there are hundreds of bank of Nigeria type scams that are willing to share millions of dollars with you for no reason other than they had a political uprising or a death in the royal family and they want to give that money to a total stranger.  All they need is your banking information.  Sure, why not?

 

Truth be told, the Internet has unlimited potential to generate money for wealth and profit.  It also has the ability to generate greed and corruption.  It's a faceless entity living in cyberspace.  There is a certain anonymity that allows for an element of ambiguity.  Sites can spring up at a moment's notice.  Website addresses that look official are bought and operated with no background checking.  Anyone can generate a site with a name of an existing cause or company as long as that name isn't already in use.  In fact, during the dot com boom of the 90's, domain names were bought up with the forethought that they could be sold like stocks later at a premium. Take Pizza.com for instance.  The guy bought the domain in 1994 for a mere $20.   This past year he sold it in auction for $2.6 million to an anonymous bidder.  Taking a cue from Vodka.com's $3 million sale to a Russian Vodka company, Clark decided to try and unload the 15 year old parked domain that he had bought in hopes of enticing a buyer.  Of course, there has been no news of the sale actually being completed.  His chance at millions may be another lesson in the anonymity of Internet bidding without paying.  

For every legitimate auction on eBay, there is a plethora of Everything Else Auctions.  These auctions shamelessly ask for hundreds of thousands if not millions towards self serving causes.   Most ask to pay off their debt or help them pay for surgery.  The fact that there are so many of these similarly listed auctions reeks of scams.   Fortunately, most people are smart enough to not pay for them as a lot of these listings close without a single bid.  However, there are a lot of auctions for items with supernatural properties that do successfully get sold.  Wiccans or whatever those wacky kids call themselves these days advertise and sell all kinds of jewelry or supposed magick artifacts for real money everyday on eBay.   These people would sell the same items in a store or on the lawn of a university student union just the same but with eBay they have the ability to market their alleged magical items to millions of potential suckers.   How can they be considered legit?  Most likely, they fall into the category of Totally Bizarre, Weird, or Slightly Unusual. The smarter eBay sellers have done their homework and designed their auctions to be seen as a "for fun" with no real intention of their items being considered really legitimately magical or haunted.  There are so many genies or dijins on eBay you'd think we shouldn't be in a recession because everything is getting their wishes granted.  The fact is that the items in these auctions are no more real than the X-ray glasses in the back of Boys Life magazines.  They are allowed on eBay because the auctions are structured in such a way to entice buyers but not violate rules.  A few phrases like "Entertainment Purposes Only" or "Results May Vary" keep them in the good graces of eBay policies.  Perhaps if I buy that Time Machine I saw on eBay, I could go back like Uncle Rico and relive my glory days....or at least go back to the early days of eBay and take advantage of the loose policies on certain auctions and make a fortune selling things like "List of McDonalds' Monopoly Rare Property Stamps" or eBooks on "eBay Zero to Hero."

 

Verdict

The Internet is Only Slightly Evil



"You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough."

Scott Evil Shaped Special K Flake available to the highest bidder.

Why only "Slightly Evil."  The Internet is neither inherently evil nor good as I've said before.  It's what you make of it.  In this case, the world has had enough time to catch up in terms of protection.  There are websites devoted to sniffing out hoaxes, scams, and other schemes.  All you have to do is go to your friendly neighborhood search engine and enter in some of the text from an offer or site and add keywords like scam, hoax, etc. and most results that bubble to the top will address the issue.   In the case of charities or organizations, do a little investigating with sites like the BBB and the IRS. You can also do a whois look up on the domain to see if it's a real cause.  Granted, there is a lot of work involved in separating the good guys from the bad guys but if you don't want to end up dealing with the loss of your savings or identity it's in you best interest to do so.  After all, it takes less time to investigate a suspicious site than it does to reclaim your savings or take back your identity.

Good sites to help.

IRS site for Tax Information for Charities & Other Non-Profits

BBB Consumer Topics site for Charities and Internet Fund Raising

Funny Stories

Karma Comeuppance from Arrogance of Internet Identity Security

Founder Todd Davis challenged thieves to steal his identity which he arrogantly claimed was safe because of LifeLock.   He even advertised his social security number as a dare to anyone.  Someone took him up on that and ended up getting a $500 loan with his information.   Now the company is being sued for false claims of insurance against identity theft.   More proof that if you give thieves the tools to take you for a ride....you deserve to ride shotgun.

The Power of the Grilled Jesus Compels You!

Part Three in the, If I Were a Rich Man series

As I close out this series, I have no other real words of wisdom or great anectdotal tales of what I would do with vast riches. I merely wish to relate one of my more recent brainstorms on how to make it big.

I have come to realize that there are two reasons why American is one of the greatest places on Earth. The first is that this is the land of opportunity and we all have the ability to create and sell whatever we want in our quest for the all mighty dollar. The other is that there will always be someone out there stupid or crazy enough to buy your product. With that, I give you one of my evil little plans. The kind of sick and twisted idea that only the genius possess and insane lament. In the past few years there has been an influx of religious artifacts appearing in the most domestic of settings. While I'm sure the Vatican has dispatched their forces to the four corners of the Earth as well as Iowa to debunk such finds, the fact remains, we are in the midst of a revolution. One that threatens to shake the very core of our lunches. I'm talking about the appearance of holy and religious images on everyday items. Most recently, the case of the Virgin Mary burned into a grilled cheese sandwhich caught national attention not because of its impact on our dogmatic beliefs, but because someone was dumb enough to pay $28,000 on eBay. GoldenPalace.com, ever the finder of rare antiquities, purchased the snack on eBay back in 2004.

It is my belief that this sandwhich should not be taken lightly. I suggest that it is a sign sent to us crazy bastards to take advantage of this epiphany. However, my attempts to capitalize on this event were met with guffaws and rolling of eyes. It doesn't take me walking around the streets of my town with a sandwhich board to spell it out. The answers are there, bubbling up through the nooks and cranies of our grilled cheese.

I give you the Grilled Jesus.

Unfortunately, someone beat me to it. I suffer from having great ideas but no ability to maket and pitch to investors. This idea was so simple, though, I figured it a slam dunk in the old baptismal font. Just make a mold like you would for pizzelles, but make it in the form of Jesus. What, you feel I'm insensitive? That I should be struck down for my blasphemous ways? I'm not saying create a sandwhich and sell it on the internet as genuine religious phenomena, that would be wrong. I meant create the mold and market it as a novelty item in Spencers. The Church has been selling salvation to us for years at a price. I merely wish to capitalize on the fact that for the most part, people have a sense of humor and aren't taking things too serious.

Damn it, I tell you I had it all mapped out. For only $19.95 plus shipping and handling you can savor the saviour. Put them in the kids lunches gauranteeing them early entry into college. Send one to work with your husband when it comes time for a raise. Why shouldn't we all find a little hallelujah in a hot lunch? Call now and we'll double your order and throw in the book of Psalm Soduku puzzles.

Ok, that last part was pushing it a little, even for me. Frankly, I give little creedence to these Mary on a sliding glass door or Jesus in the ice cube tray stories. But as long as someone out there is willing to pay insane amounts of money for these items, then I should be allowed to exploit their stupidty and say they can remit a check or money order to me at Poophill Products c/o Mongo.

Can I interest you in our Bris-O-Matic It slices, it dices..........yeah, ok, that was way beyond wrong......but admit it, you laughed.

Money can't buy you happiness, but you can Buy it Now on eBay

Part One of a series entitled, If I Were a Rich Man.

Like most grown ups, who came of age during the Alex P. Keaton, Gordon Gecko, and Reaganomics fueled capitalism era known as the 80's, I had a desire to be rich. Of course, I had no ambition to do anything to get rich other than scratch a ticket or make nice with a well-to-do old person and then just wait it out. Unfortunately, life is not like an 80's movie, which I feel is such a bummer. Can you imagine? One day, you’re a minor league pitcher in Jersey, playing for the Hackensack Bulls, and the next one you inherit $30 million dollars in which you have to spend every dime in 30 days to inherit $300 million. The things you could do in 30 days only to realize you have 10 times that amount waiting at the end of the month.

We've all played that "what if" game when we were younger. Hell, I do it on a regular basis when I walk around my home looking at what needs to be done, what I can afford to get done, and what I'd love to really do if money was no object. In grade school we would gather around a sheet of paper and play MASH to decide our financial and marital fates. Those of us with Rain Man like mentality could figure out how to render the most desirable outcome hoping to change our fates and not wind up living in a shack, married to the smelly kid, towing around 5 kids in a Brown Ford, and working as a garbage collector.

See, I misspent my youth, not on sports or honing my studies, but on scheming to make it rich. First I decided I was going to become a stock broker, buying and selling my well to financial freedom. During my college years I had various entrepreneurial endeavors going at once. Several times throughout the year, poster vendors would set up shop in the lobby of the dorms our outside of the Student Union hawking their wares. For $12 or $20 you could have a classic black and white poster of Jim Belushi wearing a college sweater or the ever popular brightly colored poster of your favorite alcoholic drinks and their ingredients. Of course if you were the more pretentious of college student you had the Van Gogh Starry Night poster or The Mosaic Poster of Bob Marley smoking a fat one. I, too, dropped about $25 on both the "Briefcase Full of Blues" and the famous Reservoir Dogs "walk" scene posters to adorn my walls all the while they developed blue adhesive putty stains that would decrease their resale value when I needed cash. I personally felt the posters were a little overpriced and saw the opportunity to sell movie posters at a cheaper price while netting me %100 profits. I combed the local video stores getting free movie posters and stockpiled them in my dorm room. With a third grade art degree and a computer account, I created a snazzy little ad to post all over campus. I made probably somewhere in the realm of $40 which pretty much covered beer and pizza for a couple of weeks.

Top 10 Most Cliché College Dorm Posters of All Time

Next, I answered some ad in the school newspaper that promised huge amounts of cash by just passing out fliers. I paid $20 for the packet that gave piss poor photocopies of scams and pyramid scheme fliers. All I had to do was pass them out affixed with my phone number and when someone called me; I sent them out the scam program and kept a percentage of the cost. Again, because of my student computer account, the only investment I had to make was the initial buy in of $20. I could use the computer labs to reproduce the fliers and just wait for the phone to ring. Unfortunately, I developed a sense of conscience and began reading the crap that was contained on the fliers. I knew the programs were worthless and targeted towards people who had an overwhelming desire to get rich quick, people like me. I ate the $20 and tossed the packet.

During the summer months while I toiled away in an amusement park for minimum wage, I orchestrated a tee shirt sale for my department that consisted of over 100 people. I paid one of the park caricature artists to draw an amusing scene that depicted the trials and tribulations of our jobs. I took it to a local print shop that handled silk screen printings for local sport teams and finagled a heck of a volume discount based on pre sale numbers. Then I figured out a cheap price for the shirts with just enough mark up to cover my expenses and netted my a few dollars for my trouble. I figured out that the first year I ended up selling about $600 worth of shirts and the second year sales jumped to an even grand. Still, I didn't see a large profit because I didn't want to cheat my friends and coworkers out of their money.

Finally, I gave up the schemes and settled on my collegiate career in Theater Arts, because quite frankly, I really did not have any marketable skills besides acting. I tend to think I was pretty good, too. I had it all planned out. I would finish up college, work the summer stockpiling money, and then make my way across this great nation of ours to Los Angeles where I would instantly be discovered and given my own sitcom and blockbuster movie deal with sequels to keep me busy into my 40's. What I realized was that I really didn't like the politics and backdoor dealings of Hollywood and I didn't want to starve for my art becoming a waiter to pay the bills on my less than one bedroom apartment over a biker bar, tucked ever so snuggly between a pawn shop and a tattoo parlor. So, I never left for L.A. Instead, I opted for staying here in good old Southwestern Pennsyltuckey and just became part of the working force...as of all things a waiter. Actually, I started out as a bartender.

After college graduation I worked on an assembly line assembling rear projection screen televisions. You could say I worked in television, putting the mirrors on the casings. Then I had a slick idea, I would start flipping bottles of spirits like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. So, I left the assembly line and began working my way through bartending school while I tended to paint balls and golf balls at a nearby recreational park. During the day, I would learn about parfaits and high balls while at night I worked for minimum wage (a slight downgrade from the television assembly line) getting run over by brats in go karts. After completing my grueling two week course at bartending school, I flipped through the job leads, and set out to make my fortune schlepping drinks. I foolishly put in my two weeks notice at the golf course and concentrated on looking for that job that promised Cocktails and Dreams. I ended learning a very valuable lesson that summer. No one was willing to hire a bartender right off the street with no experience, no matter how much they were trained. I didn't even get to flip any bottles. That was a separate course that cost a few hundred dollars and I already dropped $500 on the bartending school.

Luckily, I had the kind of parents that let me live with them post college and pre life long career. I finally got a job working as a bartender in the banquet department of a hotel. We made more than minimum wage and tips were under the table. Soon, I moved out of my parents' place and into one of my own. While, I didn't live high on the hog, I always had money for food and rent. Eventually, I went from being a bartender to being a banquet captain, which allowed me the opportunity to work morning shifts and gave me more money. Through the good fortune of knowing....er dating the right people, I was able to leave the hotel for greener pastures. In three years I had gone from having no income to making almost $25k a year. In all those years of scheming to get rich, I turned up nothing but nickels and dimes. Yet, by having patience and doing a little work, I went from having no job, to $7.50 an hour as a banquet captain to $12.00 an hour as a customer service representative. It didn't stop there, either. In another 5 years I managed to get promoted three times. I now have a house, two cars, and some of the basic luxuries of home. I got them all just by working. Of course, I now have a daughter and it throws a huge wrench into the works.

Oh yes, expenses will mount up and I've been back to my wily ways of not so much getting rich, but making extra cash to cover expenditures. I've done it all from trying to sell pithy t-shirts and buttons adorned with this blog's logo. I tried to get in on the Tickle Me Elmo craze ywo years ago by buying a couple of them, hoping to turn around and throw them on eBay when supplies ran low around Christmas. I ended up getting stuck with two Elmos for over a year. Everyone had the same idea and instead of there being no supply and a huge demand in retail outlets, there was a huge supply and little demand on eBay. I ended up selling them with some creative auctions that told the story from my wife's point of view. She was extremely agitated by the fact that I spent money on these things and couldn't sell them. The anecdotal listings struck a chord with some folks who were willing to bail out a disgruntled housewife, but not a stupid husband the year before. I had got the idea from another eBay ad about worthless Pokemon cards that netted a few hundred dollars based on the listing being written from the point of view of a frazzled mom in the grocery store with her kids.

Let's see, there was also the idea about selling "Get Rich Quick" and "Money Making Home Business" eBooks on eBay for a dollar a piece with the ability to reproduce at no cost. No, of course, I didn't buy them. A simple search on Google revealed a treasure trove of inexperienced webmasters that left their index directories wide open for me to pilfer the .pdfs from and post up for auction. Hell, I've even resorted to selling nothing on eBay. That's right, nothing. I did some research on Mystery Auctions and found that people were willing to spend a dollar or two on "digital envelopes." The digital envelopes "happen" to contain a word describing a dollar amount and that gets paid to the buyer through their PayPal account. Different monetary amounts are scattered throughout hundreds of these "envelopes" ranging from fifty cents to five dollars.
Everyone who bought an "envelope" stood to make at least 30% of their investment back while some actually made 500%. Now, this was all designed so that the amount in the envelopes was always less than the total cost for all available envelopes and the concept of the "mystery envelope auction" was more about giving and receiving positive feedback while offering the chance to make back five times what you spent. While somewhat scam worthy, I never stole money from anyone. I always clearly worded the auctions so that everyone understood the concept while not violating eBay policies. Over the last few months eBay has cracked down on these auctions and I reaaly don't want to risk losing my account over the $20 I would make per auction. During my heyday with it, I ran quite a few auctions and was able to raise $100 to buy my PS3. Again, I didn't buy it for full price, I used a mehtod from what's called an "Incentived Freebie Website" to get it for 1/4 the cost. I detailed all this in my first entry and as you can see I have listed a few along the side of my blog.

So, there it is. I've spent my life looking for an easy route to fame and fortune when the only real wealth has been derived from having a family and doing honest work. Who knows, in another 5 years I could be the CEO of a fortune 500 company.....or I'd be willing to sell you information on how to become one for little to no money on eBay. Check my feedback!