The Free Thinker

Every so often at work I have to pretend it's 1989 and saunter up to the fax machine. As I approached the discoloured piece of arcane technology yesterday I leafed through the small stack of junk faxes, as I often do.

Honestly, why are people bothering to send this 20th century version of spam? Do people trust some random ad they get through their fax machine. I mean, at least with email you can reach millions of people pretty quickly. With a fax you can send, at most, one per minute per phone line. Wow.

Anyways, as I was idly perusing the junk yesterday, I spotted something a little more entertaining than the usual vacation packages and Nigerian scams. Take a look at this (click to open full-size):


I don't even know where to begin poking holes in this thing. But let's give it a shot.

They increase their odds of winning by playing "intelligent numbers"...umm, what? As in some numbers are more likely than others? That's fundamentally not how the lottery works. They're all equally likely, stupid. The only way to beat the lottery is to rig it, or get unbelievably lucky. It's not a charity, folks.

It's said that the lottery is for people who suck it math. I say this is for people who suck at life.

They're pretty smart about the way they present it though.

WE HAVE ONLY 20 POSITIONS LEFT !!!!
YES! OVER 80% ARE FILLED
DON'T LOSE OUT FOR EVER

See the whole limited-time offer thing is smart. Creating a sense of urgency makes people act before they think.

Now the problem is thus: It costs $10,000! I would really like to meet the person who has $10,000 yet is stupid enough to fall for this half-assed scam. If you have ten grand in the bank and you can't see through this, you don't deserve that $10,000.

In fact, I'm not even going to condemn the scammers, because the holes in this are so obvious that anyone who falls for it must be blinded by greed or incredibly stupid. I bet if they made it $1,000 to enter they'd get a lot more takers.

Regardless, it's nice to see some home-grown Toronto scams for once. At least the money's staying right here, am I right? That's gotta be good for the local economy!

One final word to anybody thinking about contributing to this "plan." If you're going to flush $10,000 down the toilet, at least do it in style. Rent some hookers, order some blow, and take it all on a flight to Luxembourg. Go on a bender to end all benders. Then you can look at your empty bank account and say "I may have wasted a ton of money, but at least I can't remember a fucking thing!"