Chain letters
06:17:2005
I am writing this in response to the mail I have recently recieved exhorting the sender to send copies to all their friends.
These messages come in a few different forms:
1. The money letter This is an out and out fraud which invites the recipient to participate in a pyramid scheme designed to funnel money towards its creator. It may be disguised as a 'membership fee' or as some sort of 'information exchange' with a small admin fee, but somewhere along the road to making '$20,000 a week!' you'll have to send $5 to a complete stranger. (it's usually dollars as most of these rip-off schemes come from the US). I won't go into the mathematics of it but 99% of the people who participate in these schemes get screwed. Junk the mail immediately. If you're feeling good send the addresses of all the other participants to the fraud office.
2. The luck letter These piss me off even more than the money letters. I mean, I can understand that there are people who are using the internet for personal gain and just want to rip a few people off here and there, but what kind of evil fuck starts these malicious 'luck letters'? Here's a typical line of crap: "this letter was started in the year 1172 by grand psychic moon-priestess Zeralda the child molester and it has brought good luck to over 5,000,000,000 people since then. Send 500 copies to your friends and you will recieve good luck in the next 10 years. DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN! Carlos Manuel Madeupname recieved a copy of the letter in 1976. He immediately sent off 76,000 copies to his friends, casual acquaintances and people from the Montevideo phone book. Fourteen years later he won 50 pesos (0.0001 pence) on a Uruguayan state lottery scratchcard. In 1987 LaBruce Bjhfkugv recieved the letter and waited too long before sending it on. Fifteen seconds later she was torn apart by rabid wolves in the New York Subway. DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN! Grand psychic moon-priestess Zeralda the child molester has some people checking you out RIGHT NOW! If you don't start mailing out copies of the 'magical luck letter' they are going to beat the SHIT out of you! Uh oh! HERE THEY COME NOW! You get the idea. I have nothing against superstitious people, but if you want to believe in all that crap then go bury a dead toad at a crossroads under a full moon, or whatever it is you do. I DON'T WANT TO BE INVOLVED!
3. The 'joke' letter, or the 'story' letter Several of my friends (you know who you are) are wont to pass on jokes and funny stories that they have been sent. Often I've heard them before but on the whole I don't mind this kind of thing. Sometimes though, these stories have had an addendum along the lines of: "send ten copies of this letter to friends and you will have a great week, send five copies and you will have a good day. Send one copy and all will be well. Send no copies and you will BE CURSED FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! YES, IT'S ME AGAIN! GRAND PSYCHIC MOON PRIESTESS ZERALDA THE CHILD MOLESTER! START MAKING COPIES YOU LITTLE SHIT! MY BOYS WILL TEAR YOU A NEW ARSE!
4. The 'virus warning' letter. It took me a while to get wise to these letters. They say something like: " Warning! Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and IBM have issued the following emergency virus alert! if you recieve an email entitled 'Good times' DELETE IT IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT open it as it contains a virus that will destroy your hard drive and make all your RAM leak out of the SCSI port like black slime" These messages are quite subtle in that they often don't actually tell you to copy them and send them on, but they rely on good natured people who have little knowledge of how computers work and who want to warn their friends of what they percieve to be a mortal danger. I am not saying that it definately isn't possible to send a virus via an email message, but it is a fact that most of these 'warning messages' have been cooked up and sent out without any virus to back them up. In fact, this type of message, and indeed any message which behoves the recipient to make copies and send them on IS A VIRUS IN ITSELF.
So here's what to do:
1. Don't pass on any chain letters, virus warnings, pyramid schemes, or any crap which is trying to self-perpetuate using you as a host.
2. If you get any of the above, send it back to the person you got it from and tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine.
3. Send this message to everyone you know. Only joking- Delete this message if you want. Do what you want with it.
4. Remember that the people who start these things off are usually very sad types who don't have much of a life and want to feel empowered by knowing that something they created is wasting peoples time, money, hard drive space and bandwidth all over the world.
FUCK'EM ALL!
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