Seeing as how the idiocy of referral link spammers is rapidly growing I would like to present just why that is and why you shouldn't get suckered in and why I am immensely annoyed by the whole ordeal.
Gratis Networks (who runs all those free*.com sites) used to carry the etrust logo but it got revoked because they changed their privacy policies without telling anyone (In other words sold your information to various people). There is a huge overhead in terms of how soon your get your item. And assuming you do get your item after a long time everyone after you is screwed. Just think of it as a branching tree. For every person who has received their free item there are 5 or however many they require people after them that will get NOTHING and have signed up. So take this into account with multiple chains of people.
Lets take Freepsps for example
Take a total pool of 600 people.
1 Original Referrer + 5 Suckers (referrals) = 1 PSP
So you calculate this you get 100 People with PSPs in the End and 500 Suckers. And this is the ABSOLUTE Minimum # of people who will NOT receive PSPs. This is only assuming everyone initially is able to get 5 people to sign on. Some may just give up at 4 or lower.
This also explains the large # of scammers who have recently started flooding all sorts of msg boards with this crap. The initial group of people have gotten their stuff (which gratis uses to justify their legality). However you have a huge pool of people who have yet to fulfill their offers. Eventually it's going to burn out and you'll end up with a huge pool of people unable to get anymore referrals and a large population of spammers desperately trying to get referrals. (This is the part that bothers me since I have no problem with retards getting scammed)
Now it's known that pyramid schemes are illegal (though we see tons of them being offered at EBay constantly). What makes this legal? It's simple they offer referrals instead of actually taking your money like other pyramid schemes. It's a relatively simple loophole. And people don't question them because they just flaunt about how some people have received these items. Which they have indeed, at the cost of tons of people below them.
Anyway just my 2 cents.
Gratis Networks (who runs all those free*.com sites) used to carry the etrust logo but it got revoked because they changed their privacy policies without telling anyone (In other words sold your information to various people). There is a huge overhead in terms of how soon your get your item. And assuming you do get your item after a long time everyone after you is screwed. Just think of it as a branching tree. For every person who has received their free item there are 5 or however many they require people after them that will get NOTHING and have signed up. So take this into account with multiple chains of people.
Lets take Freepsps for example
Take a total pool of 600 people.
1 Original Referrer + 5 Suckers (referrals) = 1 PSP
So you calculate this you get 100 People with PSPs in the End and 500 Suckers. And this is the ABSOLUTE Minimum # of people who will NOT receive PSPs. This is only assuming everyone initially is able to get 5 people to sign on. Some may just give up at 4 or lower.
This also explains the large # of scammers who have recently started flooding all sorts of msg boards with this crap. The initial group of people have gotten their stuff (which gratis uses to justify their legality). However you have a huge pool of people who have yet to fulfill their offers. Eventually it's going to burn out and you'll end up with a huge pool of people unable to get anymore referrals and a large population of spammers desperately trying to get referrals. (This is the part that bothers me since I have no problem with retards getting scammed)
Now it's known that pyramid schemes are illegal (though we see tons of them being offered at EBay constantly). What makes this legal? It's simple they offer referrals instead of actually taking your money like other pyramid schemes. It's a relatively simple loophole. And people don't question them because they just flaunt about how some people have received these items. Which they have indeed, at the cost of tons of people below them.
Anyway just my 2 cents.
