Greed, Stupidity, Insidious Marketing Techniques & Curiousity

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook received an unfortunate spam-like message from me a few days ago. But it wasn’t spam. I sent it on purpose, because I am a total retard.
To all of you: I'm really sorry about that.


Captivated by a similar message from one of my friends in my inbox, I took the bait and sold my friends list to the Best Buy devil. I saw the promise of “A $1000 Best Buy gift card to the first 20,000 fans!!!” and figured I hadn’t much to lose socially in the Facebook department, anyway.
So first I clicked the button signing myself up to be a fan.
And then I clicked the button that sent a message to everyone I’m connected with on Facebook.
And then I clicked the button that was supposed to take me to my prize.


But there were still a few easy, quick steps to take before getting my prize! My $1000 PRIZE!!! Some of those easy, quick steps were several pages of forms and questionnaires. A few more of those easy, quick steps were to simply choose 2, out of a long list of offers, to complete! I easily and quickly found two alleged ‘free trial’ offers to complete so I would only be out a total of $4.95 before getting MY $1000 GIFT CARD! FREE MONEY! But then my heart sank, as the next easy, quick step was to complete only 9 of the next list of offers. I was running out of time, and credulity.

As raging alarms sounded Abort! Abort! Abort! I quickly canceled my free trials. I called up OnLingo and told them not to send me the French Language lessons, after all.
The nice gentleman there refunded my shipping and handling fee and made sure I understood in detail all of the amazing offers that were available to me that I was knowingly (and foolishly?) turning down. Within 5 minutes I received a text message about a $200 WalMart gift voucher waiting for me (another good thing I passed up), and a call from Eric at DebtSolutionsUSA, who was disappointed to learn that I only have school loan debt, which apparently they have no solutions for. Over the weekend our credit card was frozen due to my own suspicious activity.


I’m considering grounding myself from the internet indefinitely. And yet, there’s still a little part of me that truly believes I would have gotten that gift card in the end, it just wasn’t worth the $100-200 spent on various offers for loads of worthless crap that stood in the way. I guess I’ll never know.

Comments

Matt Mikalatos said…
I'm not sure how my day could get any more awesome now that I've seen and enjoyed the following sentence:

"Over the weekend our credit card was frozen due to my own suspicious activity."
lj said…
OH alexis, the quote about your credit card being frozen made me laugh so hard i cried! thanks for sharing about your adventure.

If it's any consolation, i almost joined because you did. i figured credibility via friend was sufficient :).

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