Mail order scams to watch out for:
by John Thielking
What about all of those money making offers that
you recieve in the mail, promising that you will earn a million dollars
within a year and claiming that the US government provides billions of
dollars in subsidies to make these money making schemes possible?
Well, these are almost all of them schemes telling you how you can make
your fortune using mail order/direct mail selling info products just
like the sellers of the schemes themselves do. While the initial
advertisements claim that no money is required for these schemes and
they often brag about how the founder of the scheme was so broke when
they started that they couldn't feed their kids or some such
thing, you actually are required to come up with at least $500
for your initial mailing of 1000 pieces of junk mail to an opportunity
seekers mailing list. Then, in
addition to utilizing the response boosting tips included in the manual
you just ordered from the company for $35, you have to be an expert
copywriter if you expect to get any
response at all. I have found that even the already prepared mailers of
programs such as Lotto Magic don't convert responses into profit making
sales right away.
The government subsidy mentioned in some of the
ads refers to the US govt bailout of the post office, which is
currently running a deficit. You don't get to personally profit from
this "subsidy" unless you are successful at direct mail marketing. You
can forget about simply filling out forms and collecting checks. There
is no such program. The names of some of these schemes
include: Time Is Money Reports, Simple Forms by P.R. Forms Company, Leo
Scopes Company, The 99 Day Bailout Program, Bill Hebden's Getting
Your First Million (with the longest delivery time -- over 10 weeks --
of any of the programs that actually deliver something in return for
your money), Automated Derivative Master Template, Euro Trust AMG,
Grace & Co, Illuminati Financial (according to one blog post this
company takes 6 months to deliver their product. My personal
experience is that it took them the maximum allowed 8 weeks to send me
their stuff.) and The Secret
Handshake
Society. The Secret Handshake Society seems to be different in
that they claim you will be specifically trading commodities, but then
they come up with the dead horse of the govt subsidizes the business
they are running argument, again, code words for "this is a mail order
scheme". I have actually recieved the advertised products from all of
these except F
Rivers Marketing. There was also a program that promises $15,000
per month for mailing two letters. Even with this program, there is no
escaping the mailing of thousands of letters to make money --- you
simply mail two letters; one to the mailing list company and one to the
letter shop
and they do all the work for you --- still at a rate of 50-80 cents per
letter mailed.
So far, the only scam that doesn't send you anything in return for your
$39 is F Rivers Marketing, 645 W 9th Street #110-805, Los Angeles, CA
90015-1640. They claim that you can make money by mailing
letters.
This scheme might actually work in real life if you were remailing
letters recieved in bulk from overseas that were destined for US
addresses. The cost of mailing a one ounce letter overseas runs
about $2 each, but the cost of shipping a bulk lot of letters from
overseas is much less per letter. Now your task is simply to find a
company that wants to send lots of letters from overseas to US
addresses. Why F Rivers Marketing doesn't deliver on their
promise is a real mystery since I suspect that their program would
actually work, unlike the others, which are pie in the sky offers.
Of particular note are Grace & Co and Illuminati Financial. They
both claim that their special techniques will boost response rates to
direct mail offers by 300%-400%, increasing profits by up to
1500%. Grace & Co claimed in their manual that they used
their special technique (hand addressing envelopes) to get me to buy
their product (which they did not). Illuminati Financial did not
use their confidential technique to sell me their product either.
Considering that a run of the mill 2% response rate for a $35 product
will cause the direct mailer to lose money or at best break even, I
can't imagine why these two companies aren't actually using the
techniques they claim are so great. To the credit of Illuminati
Financial, their general technique is mentioned, kind of, in a passage
that is available here
for free on the internet. Since I have posted this info, I have
recieved some offers that appear to be hand addressed. Only one
was really hand addressed. The rest were laser printed in cursive
font and still had the bar codes and mail sorting codes on the address,
totally fake.
I guess the real secret to making lots of money with direct mail is to
do as the politicians do and say anything that sounds good (as in too
good to be true) to make the sale. Then find the mailing list
that I am on apparently, called "suckers only", (for people who have
responded to five or more offers in their lifetimes) and mail to that
list exclusively. I can tell that I am on at least 3 different
mailing lists judging by the unique typos or omissions in my address on
each piece of mail.
Post Script: The one that got away. The best program for
working at home that I have found is the offer put up by the Zaken Corp
in Chatsworth CA. They give you some instructions on how to find
deals where companies with unwanted merchandise will agree to sell the
stuff for a price determined by a formula that the Zaken Corp gives you
in the instructions. I found several companies that would have
given me deals worth over $100k in profit, but unfortunately the Zaken
Corp dropped the ball at their end. Not one of at least 5 deals
went through (they never found a buyer at their end). I suppose
it wouldn't be too bad if it turned out that I should have kept trying
and eventually get the Zaken Corp to close 10% of the deals that I
present to them. But I didn't have that much patience. At my end I was
closing 80% or better for people who agreed to sell their stuff for the
initial offer price so I didn't understand why Zaken Corp couldn't
close at their end. This was in 2005. A key to finding
deals was to use a special phone book that has nationwide listings of
companies that have more than 1 million dollars in sales per
year. Call ATT and ask them for it. That is probably better than
using the same 800 number directory that the Zaken Corp reccommends
that everyone else is using.
Another loser opportunity:
American Homebuyer Associates, 1101 D
Thorpe Lane #430, San Marcos, TX 78666 or 9433 Bee Cave Road Suite
2110, Austin, TX 78733. www.freebonus.com/your-name plus
unique password given on postcard. These scammers offer to sell you a
course for $99 on how to make money finding short sales. They
claim that no license or real estate experience is required to do their
program. This is a big lie that could land you in jail if you are
not careful (as in don't even try this program even if you have the
required licenses). For starters, most any type of real estate
transaction that you participate in requires that you have a real
estate license or the assistance of a person with a real estate
license. Sometimes you also have to be bonded. In the case of
finding short sales in CA, you need to be a real estate broker. Even
brokers are not allowed to charge the "junk fees" that participants in
the AHA program are charging.
See http://www.dre.ca.gov/pdf_docs/ca/ConsumerAlert_ShortSalesUpdate.pdf
for
an update on the situation regarding so-called Short Sale
Negotiators.
An even bigger loser: The
Secret Handshake Society. For your $5 you get a booklet that
tells you how to make it big selling info products. That part is
a bargain considering that most companies charge $35 for simillar
books. The rip off and scam is the red envelope that comes with
the booklet. Inside the red envelope is an offer to "do all the work
for you" that sells for $50. For your $50 you recieve 9 expertly
prepared booklets, probably not spell checked just like the one for
$5, on how to make big money fast, plus prepared advertising copy
to sell the booklets that is promised to pull well when you send it to
prospects, plus you get the resale rights to all of the above. At
least two of these booklets are complete scams on their face: A booklet
on how to make a geniune diamond that is worth more than $250k for a
few hundred dollars and a booklet on Real Self Liquidating Loans.
For a bit of background on the outright criminal nature of these
"loans", check out : http://www.quatloos.com/scams/selfliqd.htm.
For background on synthetic diamonds (which are the only kind that man
knows how to make) check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond
. Note that a synthetic diamond is easy to spot and there is no
way that you would get $250k for any amount of synthetic diamonds that
you could hand carry, much less produce yourself in your garage. The
only way that I can see that the average joe can use to produce
diamonds of any kind is to use dynamite, hopefully in an open field.
A third booklet tells you how to get a Platinum American Express Card
with bad credit. Only someone with bad credit would need a credit
card that has a $450 per year membership fee. There is also a report on
how to get a Swiss bank account. Using google to research this a
bit it turns out that getting a Swiss bank account is more trouble than
it is worth. The Swiss anti-moneylaundering laws require you to
fill out more paperwork and provide more doccumentation than it takes
to apply for food stamps in the U.S.. I'll just take my check to my
local U.S. bank and deposit it there, thank you very much. They
don't care where it comes from.
Somewhere in the series of 9 booklets is the secret outlined in the
initial offer for $5 where you can earn $100,000 in your first
month. But even that figure is a testimonial and probably not
representative of what you can earn. Considering the quality of almost
1/2 of the booklets, I am not willing to risk my last $50, which I
already promised people I would be spending on Peacemovies.com, on
these scams.
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