Do you remember those old pyramid schemes?  The ones where you were sent a bulky letter in the mail, with a giant list of people and their addresses, and you were supposed to send like one dollar to the first ten or something like that, then add your name to the top of the list, and mail it off to a billion other poor saps and hope they would give you the same courtesy…  and hopefully in a few months time you’d have dollar bills rolling into your mailbox?

I thought those went the way of the dinosaurs with the birth of the internet and the new way to do pyramid schemes, but apparently that is not so.

A couple months back I got a bulky letter in the mail, addressed directly to ME, with my current married name.  I opened it, and what do I find?  One of those stupid pyramid chain letters, only this one “claims” because they use a certain phrase in it, that it is now perfectly legal, and there are only like six peoples’ names on the list for you to send money to.

Of course if you want to participate, you have to cough up the money to buy a mailing list.  Then cough up more money for all of the envelopes you will need, not to mention the costs for copying ten thousand copies of the letter, and then even more money to buy stamps to mail them all out!

I got another one of these Thursday!

I can’t believe people still try these things.  I guess the hope is that if they send it out to enough people, if a small fraction of those people participate, at the very least that person may get their investment back, but hopefully more.

Bah!  I am in the bunch of people who just throw those stupid things away and curse the company that sold my address to these idiots.  You have wasted your $1-$1.50 on me, people.  Because I really don’t think my trash can is going to send you or any of the other people on your list a dollar.

Tags: Chain Letters, Dollar Bills, Money, Pyramid Schemes, Snail Mail, Stupid Things