The Microsoft Moneypot
The other day I got one of those email forwards. You've probably gotten this one too. It's the one that says that Microsoft is testing an email tracking program and will pay you $200+ for each person you send the email too.
When you forward this email to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two-week time period. For every person that you forward this email to, Microsoft will pay you $245, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243, and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.Well, I decided to do some digging into the hoax and found this article from the July 2004 issue of Wired Magazine on the history of this, the oldest of email hoaxes. They actually tracked down the guy who started it back in 1997:
It all started on November 18, 1997, when the guy sitting beside him in the computer lab received a get-rich-quick email, one of the first examples of spam that either of them had seen. "I can come up with something better than that," Mack boasted. Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. Mack thought it was funny enough to send to a friend at Loras College in Dubuque, with "bill gates here" in the subject line. It made the guy laugh, so he passed it on.Interesting article.
BTW - If you're going to send these emails on to your entire mailing list, by all means use BCC instead of the To or CC fields. I went through my copy of the MS email tracking message and found 108 email addresses. If I was a spammer, I just found 108 new victims. By using BCC, you only annoy your friends with useless hoaxes without exposing them to a spam risk.
BTW 2 - In addition to the usual email spam I get offering to make parts of my anatomy larger, get me low cost better prescriptions drugs to make that anatomy perform, software at low, low prices and other, uh, interesting products; I'm now getting spam offering to help me train my dog. Huh? Anyone else getting those?
