MAKE.MONEY.FAST and the Law
"Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town,
And raise new credits first, then cry 'em down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears." --- Defoe
Introduction
It is often striking, when one goes to study the law, how many great legal
issues are brought to the fore by people who are essentially grotty little
grasping cheats. Clarence Gideon, lowlife and perennial loser, was
convicted without an attorney of walking out of a bar with a bottle of
red-eye whiskey and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where
the Court first
recognized the duty of states to provide attorneys for the accused.
(Sure enough - he was acquitted on retrial when his attorney
cross-examined the chief witness.) Marbury
v. Madison, which described for the first time in detail the Supreme
Court's role in the American checks-and-balances system, arose over an
inter-party conflict when one President took over acrimoniously from a
departing one.
In just this manner, the modern-day MAKE.MONEY.FAST scammer is heir to a
long line of criminal traditions, and efforts to stop chain letters and
other frauds (other slang terms for them include 'spamscammers' or
'scamspammers') implicate a wide variety of legal interests, even though
the cheaters themselves are one of the lowest forms of human life.
History
"The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always
rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known,
have all been practicised. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals
may not." --- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, (1977).
There are a number of historical and legal paths which lead to the modern
day spam-scammer.
Mail
Fraud. Starring Benjamin Franklin, America's first MMF fighter, and
Charles Dickens, Spam Fighter! Chain letters and mail fraud pre-date
spamscammers by hundreds of years.
Pyramid
Schemes. Not all multi-level
marketing schemes are fraudulent - but enough of them are that they've
developed a whole new name for them: pyramid schemes. Chain letters and
MMF are the purest form of pyramid schemes. Come here and meet the
original Ponzi, the nefarious impresario of fraud Glenn W. Turner, and
many other master criminal minds whose exploits are copied shamelessly
by chickenboners the world over.
There are equally several ways that courts and lawmakers have tried to
stop scammers of these kinds.
When compiling this history, I found constant incredulity about one point,
perhaps the most important question of MMF:
Why do pyramid schemes and chain letters work?
I mean, they wouldn't proliferate like they do if someone, somewhere,
didn't make a few bucks off of it. And as we saw, when managed adroitly
(Glenn W. Turner and Koscot Interplanetary), they can be downright
lucrative despite being very obviously fraudulent and very obviously
illegal.
Pyramid schemes seem like such an obvious sort of fraud that it is often
incredible to people that they continue to work. The reason is simple:
greed. People want something for nothing. They want to
make a lot of money without working for it. I'm not a prude about making
money. Money is useful. But it isn't everything, and it's not worth
breaking the law for. The criminal scammer preys on the greed of his
victims, not necessarily their gullibility. If someone is greedy enough,
their good judgment goes out the window. Like the man says:
"From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where
to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far
beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the
dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned." ---
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
I hope you enjoy this little excursion into history and legal analysis. If
you want to contact me, my address is at the bottom of the page.
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice even if sometimes it might
look like it is. Remember, this is a history page. If
you want legal advice, talk to a lawyer.
A
Sisyphus Project Production
Jason Corley --
corleyj@cobweb.scarymonsters.net