Beware of Web pages bearing gifts
Web pages are full of ads offering all sorts of amazing free stuff like Toshiba laptops and copies of Windows Vista Ultimate. (Incidentally, a lot of these originate from Google AdSense.) Obviously, there’s a catch somewhere and I decided to find out what it is. So I set out to get a free copy of the full edition of Vista Ultimate, a $399 item.
I created a throwaway email address and I clicked on one of the ubiquitous offers. The first page asked me to enter my zip code to see if the offer were valid in my area. I don’t know if some states have stricter laws than others or whether the citizens of some areas are more gullible than others but I put in a NJ code that fit the false address I was going to use. The next page asked me to give the address where my free Vista would be shipped, my telephone number, and my email address. There were also some marketing questions. Using a false identity, I filled in the required information. (Incidentally, they accepted 555-1212 for the telephone number.) The next page assured me I was almost done (a misleading statement if there ever was one) but said I needed to complete their page of other free offers. I had to check yes or no by 16 different offers, some of which were already checked yes and had to be changed. I submitted the page and another page of offers appeared that again had to be checked no in many places. And then another page of offers appeared and then another and then another. It was tiresome but in the interests of research I plowed on.
Then things got stickier. All of a sudden the offer of free Vista Ultimate turned into a free Vista Business edition, a drop in value of $100. Further, although the first group of pages let me say no to everything, now I got page after page where I was required to accept at least one offer. And these were not free offers but all required an actual purchase and a credit card number. By this time, I had decided to get on with my life and I gave up. I have no idea how long the charade would have gone on but I imagine that very few people who start the process ever finish, let alone collect the free copy of Vista or whatever the bait is. Buried in the small print of the initial page was the statement that “delivery may be delayed due to shortage of supply”. In other words, you may have a long wait before you get your supposed free reward. No doubt the company behind this “free” offer collects a lot of marketing information and snares a lot of hopeful suckers into trying some of their various products without ever having to actually give away very many (if any) copies of Vista or Toshiba laptops or whatever.
And of course the email address that you give immediately starts getting spam. I checked it while I was in the middle of the process and there were spam messages within a few minutes after I filled out the first form. At the end I gleefully discarded the address.
So once more the old adage, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, holds true.
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