Fraud - Parody of Reasoning
One of the more interesting facets of fraud is how the promoters of business opportunities appear to use the language of economic rationality in justifying their fraud or scam. The explanations are either completely convoluted or a parody of reason.
Consider this example regarding 12dailypro, an autosurf program being investigated by the FBI.
Let's say a company called ABCD Investments (a make believe company) wants to get more traffic to their web site. They contact an autosurf company such as 12 Daily Pro and pay them money to increase their web traffic. ABCD Investments believes that a certain percentage of people visiting their web site will buy what they are selling. So they are willing to pay to get potential buyers to their site.In exchange for this payment 12 Daily Pro turns around and pays internet users like you and me to view ABCD Investments' web site for a few seconds. This way ABCD Investments gets the traffic they want while the web site surfers like you and me get paid to view their web site.
There are thousands of companies that will pay to get additional traffic to their sites. Auto surf companies such as 12 Daily Pro have thousands of web sites that they are supposed to get traffic for and thousands of people that they pay to view those sites. Web surfers just like you can "auto surf" those web sites for just a few minutes a day with the possibility of making a huge return on their investment.
What is wrong with this reasoning, such as it is?
One can imaginge Monty Python writing this. A company is going to pay you to look at their ads, knowing that you aren't going to buy anything. Right then, what we lose on paying the autosurf "customers" we will make up on the volume from our "customers" who don't buy anything. Hmm.
