Live from Austin!

Got a phone call a while back from a company claiming I had won a contest with a prize of an SUV or a cruise. Since that’s not the kind of thing I’d want to win, I was immediately suspicious. The fact that they had fake caller ID info didn’t help. I told them I was pretty certain I hadn’t entered any such contest, and if they thought otherwise they could send me some info in the mail.

They called back a few minutes later, and someone claiming to be the manager of the previous caller tried to engage me in conversation again. I repeated, more firmly, that I wasn’t going to talk to a company with fake caller ID information trying to interest me in collecting the prize from a contest I hadn’t entered. I also pointed out that we’re on the do not call list (both the national one and the Texas one), so they were calling illegally.

They called back a third time after I hung up. I recognized the fake caller ID and ignored it.

Today I got a "letter" designed to look like a couple of boarding passes plus a prize notification about my SUV and/or cruise. It claims to be from "AVC Travel". A little Google research shows that AVC Travel = Awards Verification Center = a timeshare company. Google Awards Verification Center and you’ll find plenty of information. They have hundreds of BBB complaints lodged about them, and the BBB’s articles about the company warn against doing business with them.

Their addresses include 2400 W Pioneer Pkwy in Arlington TX, and 1221 River Bend in Dallas TX. They’ve also operated offices out of San Antonio in the past. They’ve been running the same business for years. They used to send dubious looking postcards, but these new mailings are much slicker and more convincing. It surprises me that they can get away with outright lying that the reader has won a prize worth "a minimum of $1,295", simply by adding the weasel words "Certain restrictions apply" in small print at the bottom of the letter.

While I don’t normally write up every scam attempt that hits my mailbox–who has the time?–these guys are so sleazy and so aggressive on the phone that I think their antics deserve some more Google visibility.

Note that there is another company called America’s Vacation Center, who also go by the initials AVC. I imagine they’re not too pleased that crooks are now using their name.

1. It’s 10:30 at night. You’re watching TV, when someone knocks quietly on the front door. Do you:

1. Answer the door.
2. Ignore it.
3. Yell “Go away.”
4. Pretend you’re not in.
5. Call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

2. Imagine you open the door. It’s dark, and a light rain has recently stopped. There’s a man at the door. He’s reasonably well dressed, but has torn the pocket of his trousers on something. He’s not obviously drunk or high. He starts to tell you a somewhat confused story involving a broken down car. Do you:

1. Listen politely.
2. Shut the door on him.
3. Tell him to go away.
4. Threaten to call the police.
5. Close the door and actually call the police.
6. Fetch your gun.

3. Imagine you have allowed him to finish his story of woe. He tells you that he was at a restaurant with friends, but that his car broke down, and that it seems the battery is cracked and he doesn’t have the cash to go to the nearest store and get a replacement. He begs you for some money, promising to give it back as soon as he can. He offers to leave his military ID with you as some kind of collateral.

Suppose for the sake of this exercise that the amount he’s asking for is of no consequence to you; that you could blow that much on CDs and not have to think about it. Suppose you also have a pretty good idea that his story doesn’t really hold up, and that you’re very unlikely to see the money again. Do you:

1. Give him the money anyway.
2. Give him the money, but insist on collateral.
3. Shut the door on him.
4. Tell him that you know he’s scamming you, and that he should go away.
5. Threaten to call the police.
6. Close the door and actually call the police.
7. Fetch your gun.
8. Dear god, please don’t tell me you actually gave him money, you idiot.

You don’t have to give your reasoning, and there are no prizes.

I just got a phone call from someone claiming we had won some sort of prize. Specifically, one of the following:

1. A Ford Explorer.
2. $2,500 cash.
3. A 7 night cruise in Florida and the Bahamas.
4. A 27″ Panasonic TV.

Obviously right away I was suspicious. Decades of experience have taught me that mathew winning valuable prizes is not the way the universe works. As a young child I had a bunch of Premium Bonds; ERNIE never picked me, but my cousin won something several times. (Bitterness begins at an early age.)

It wasn’t totally out of the question, though. I do fill out opinion polls and customer feedback forms, and they often claim that I have some remote chance of winning something as a result. Not that I ever do.

The word “cruise” fired some neurons which cascaded to the part of my brain responsible for identifying scams. It had definitely heard about situations similar to this one, and suggested that the word ‘timeshare’ was likely to come up in conversation fairly soon. However, the guy was polite and low pressure, so I humored him.

My anonymous benefactor told me that I absolutely did not have to buy anything, and that I was guaranteed one of the four prizes. I got the various details of how to claim my prize jotted down, and gave him my e-mail address so he could send me more info. (Assuming it gets past my spam filters, which is frankly doubtful.) Then I hung up the phone and went to Google.

As far as I can determine, it’s the usual scam—you’ve almost certainly encountered it if you’ve tried to walk down the strip in Vegas. You’re guaranteed a prize from a list, with one small catch—you have to go somewhere inconvenient and listen to a 90 minute pitch about timeshare property.

Your prize is determined ‘randomly’ via a scratch card. And that’s where it becomes scammy, because apparently everyone on the web who has written about their experience with one of these companies, ‘randomly’ won the cruise vacation. What are the odds?

Oh, obviously the cruise vacation doesn’t include the airfare; you have to pick up the tab for that part. Furthermore, the company running the promotion is apparently having terrible trouble finding a print shop, because according to accounts on the web they always seem to have run out of vouchers just before the presentation. Instead, they take the lucky winner’s name and address again, so they can send the voucher to cash in for the vacation by mail.

But the curious thing is, nobody ever seems to have received one of the vacation vouchers by mail. Obviously some kind of conspiracy on the part of the US Postal Service. I saw postings from a few people who have tried to follow up, only to discover that the sales office has disappeared like something out of The Game.

A little more Googling turned up a web publication calling itself The Timeshare Beat. They had heard of the company in question—“Vacation Network Inc.”:

For an upfront fee of several hundreds of dollars, VNAC et al will allegedly assist timeshare salespersons to convince you, the consumer, that the timeshare you are about to purchase will rent for lots of money and that you can count on this money to pay for the down payment or the full purchase of the Timeshare or Vacation Membership. This is a complete and utter lie of course, and no consumer we have spoken to has ever received so much as a phone call from them (let alone any rental money) after they paid for the service. This show for the closing table has been going on for years, especially in Mexico.

So apparently they’re a bunch of crooks after all. Still, there is one way I could get a prize out of them—I’m on the Federal and State “Do Not Call” lists, and I see that Vacation Network has already had several DNC judgements against it in various states.

But frankly, I can’t be bothered. They haven’t annoyed me enough. Now, if they call a second time…

I also got mail from Publisher’s Clearinghouse this week, for the first time ever. They would be the Reader’s Digest of the USA, if it wasn’t for the fact that Reader’s Digest is also a US invention. Apparently they started out selling discount magazine subscriptions, but now they seem to have moved on entirely to selling assorted household tat like electric fruit peelers (yes, really) and bookmark flashlights.

Buying a house is a really good way to attract the attention of sleazy businesses. We’ve had about a dozen offers of mortgage protection insurance. It’s not the service which is sleazy, it’s the way they offer it:

• The envelope has a message saying something like “Urgent information about your mortgage”.
• The name of the company we arranged our mortgage through is displayed in bold on the envelope, and usually in large bold print on the letter inside, to make it look as if it’s from them.
• The name of the company actually offering the insurance is usually not mentioned anywhere, except as the first line of the address on the reply-paid envelope.
• The letter is often from Delaware or North Carolina, states infamous for their lax regulation of financial services.
• The letter inside orders me to fill it out, as if it’s something I have to do to keep the mortgage.

For example, this afternoon’s sleazebag letter starts out like this:

Attention: Important Notice

Complete and Return

RE: MORTGAGE TIME SENSITIVE

[Name of actual mortgage company]

It goes on to say that the offer “terminates in 13 months after the close of escrow”—with an asterisk leading to a footnote in 6 point type saying that in fact, the insurance “may be purchased by homeowner at a later date”, though they may require a medical.

This particular solicitation manages to avoid revealing who it’s from at all—the reply paid envelope lists the “Mortgage Protection Center” at an anonymous PO box, and the letter just says that the letter is from “independent life and disability agents representing multiple A and A+ carriers offering specialized mortgage protection products”.

I’m sure they get plenty of business this way, but it doesn’t exactly make me want to send them my Social Security Number…

Apparently there are some people still falling for that “freeipod.com” pyramid scheme. I posted a pretty skeptical analysis last month, but TrollJournal ate it. I thought the whole pyramid would have collapsed by now, but it seems not. So, let’s repeat the analysis…

Let’s try to give freeipod.com the benefit of the doubt, and be optimistic in our analysis.

First off, note that every time someone goes to the site and registers directly, rather than being referred there, nobody gets credit for that new member, so existing members are less likely to get their free iPods. So, let’s assume that the only way people ever join is by being referred, hence maximizing the chance that people who sign up will get an iPod.

Next, note that there is clearly a finite world population. Once the necessary referrals have signed up and won you your free iPod, any additional referrals are just reducing the number of people remaining who might sign up, and again reducing the chances of the people who have already signed up finding enough new members to refer. So let’s also assume that nobody collects more than the minimum number of referrals required, which is 5.

Now we need to estimate how long it takes someone to find 5 referrals. I’m gonna say 24 hours, partly because it seems like a reasonable number, and partly because it makes the mathematics really easy. Everyone knows at least 5 people who read their e-mail more than once a day, right?

Our final assumption is that it doesn’t get harder to find referrals as time goes on. This is a ridiculous assumption, but hey, we’re trying to be optimists, right?

Enough assumptions. The nugget of data we need is when the whole scheme started. I did some searching on Google, and found public postings about the site dated July 19th.

So, we have our algorithm: we start July 19th with 1 member. Each day, each member who hasn’t won an iPod (i.e. those who joined the previous day) finds 5 new members, and becomes eligible for a free iPod. The next day, each of those new members will find 5 more new members so they can get their free iPod, and so on.

I wrote a quick Perl program to compute the results.

Jul 19:
 Site has 1 members.
 The 1 most recent members find 5 more.
 Apple has shipped 1 iPods.

Jul 20:
 Site has 6 members.
 The 5 most recent members find 25 more.
 Apple has shipped 6 iPods.

Jul 21:
 Site has 31 members.
 The 25 most recent members find 125 more.
 Apple has shipped 31 iPods.

Jul 22:
 Site has 156 members.
 The 125 most recent members find 625 more.
 Apple has shipped 156 iPods.

Jul 23:
 Site has 781 members.
 The 625 most recent members find 3,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 781 iPods.

Jul 24:
 Site has 3,906 members.
 The 3,125 most recent members find 15,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 3,906 iPods.

Jul 25:
 Site has 19,531 members.
 The 15,625 most recent members find 78,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 19,531 iPods.

Jul 26:
 Site has 97,656 members.
 The 78,125 most recent members find 390,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 97,656 iPods.

Jul 27:
 Site has 488,281 members.
 The 390,625 most recent members find 1,953,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 488,281 iPods.

Jul 28:
 Site has 2,441,406 members.
 The 1,953,125 most recent members find 9,765,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 2,441,406 iPods.

Jul 29:
 Site has 12,207,031 members.
 The 9,765,625 most recent members find 48,828,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 12,207,031 iPods.

Jul 30:
 Site has 61,035,156 members.
 The 48,828,125 most recent members find 244,140,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 61,035,156 iPods.

Jul 31:
 Site has 305,175,781 members.
 The 244,140,625 most recent members find 1,220,703,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 305,175,781 iPods.

Aug 1:
 Site has 1,525,878,906 members.
 The 1,220,703,125 most recent members find 6,103,515,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 1,525,878,906 iPods.

Aug 2:
 Site has 7,629,394,531 members.
 The 6,103,515,625 most recent members would need to find 30,517,578,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 7,629,394,531 iPods.

Everyone on the planet now has an iPod.

So there we have it. If we set our assumptions to maximize your chances of winning an iPod, everyone on the planet already has an iPod.

Of course, the nice thing about having code to crank out the numbers is that I can now fiddle with the assumptions. If we assume it takes everyone two days to find 5 more members, then the remaining population of the earth got their iPods today, August 16th. So, if you didn’t get yours, don’t panic, it’s probably in the mail.

Update 2004-09-24

Forbes is reporting that people are suing freeipods.com for not shipping them the free iPod they qualified for. The company claims Apple simply isn’t shipping them the thousands of iPods they’ve ordered, and that people will get their free iPods real soon now, honest.

Oh, and the lucky suckerscustomers of the service also say they’re being inundated with spam.

I’m shocked to find out from Forbes that this may not be a legitimate business operation. Shocked, I tell you.