Choose Your Color

Scanning through facebook tonight, one of the ads on the right caught my eye: I knew there was probably a catch that involved paying for it in the end, but it was enough to peek my curiosity, so I clicked through and was greeted by a form to sign up. The sponsorship bit at the bottom clued me in that this was probably one of those free-whatever sites where you sign yourself for lots of programs where you end up with several new credit cards, credit reports and a new Netflix and/or Blockbuster online account. You usually ave to pay S/H but if you are quick with the cancel, you can limit your expenses quite a bit. Most of those deals also require you to get a few other people to sign up. That is always the most difficult part.

Scanning the fine print showed the following:

THE FOLLOWING IS A SUMMARY OF PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS. SEE TERMS FOR COMPLETE DETAILS. Members are being accepted subject to the following Program Requirements: 1) Must be a legal US resident; 2) must be at least 18 years old or older; 3) must have a valid email and shipping address; 4) Eligible members can receive the incentive gift package by completing two reward offers from each of the Top, Prime and Premium reward offer page options. Various types of reward offers are available. Completion of reward offers most often requires a purchase or filing a credit application and being accepted for a financial product such as a credit card or consumer loan. The following link illustrates a Representative Sample of reward offers by group along with monetary and non-monetary obligations. Failure to submit accurate registration information will result in loss of eligibility. This promotion is administered solely by this website. The manufacturers and retailers of the gift items offered through our programs have not endorsed this promotion and are not affiliated with the promotion in anyway. All trademarks, service marks, logos, and/or domain names (including the names of products and retailers) are property of their respective owners. This promotion is not valid to residents of Washington state and is void where prohibited by law. Please read the Terms and Conditions for complete program details. Your information will be shared with our marketing partners. Please read the Privacy Policy for more details.

The paragraph shown actually had a link to a page with the different offers for each level. The top and prime offers were all the usual suspects: Blockbuster, Experian, Netflix, Discover, and a slew of online language, weight loss, movie and other random subscription-based sites. That’s all fine and dandy and what you would expect in this situation. They aren’t always the greatest ways to blow some money, but most are free or fairly inexpensive and easily canceled and given the amount (roughly 20 or so for each section, so 40 total) there might even be some that you are remotely interested in. I was a bit shocked at the final premium offers, however:

PREMIUM OFFERS

• Angel Beds: Make a purchase that is a minimum of $1500.00 before taxes and shipping costs. Keep beyond trial period of 90 days from receipt of item(s).
• Club Furniture: Make a purchase that is a minimum of $1500.00 before taxes and shipping costs. Keep beyond 30 days of receipt of item(s).
• Rail Europe: Requires purchase of a travel package for two with a minimum value of $899.00 per person.
• Round Square Hosting: Requires purchase of a one-year platinum hosting package for $840.00.

Holy shit! So you have your choice of 2 of 4 offers when 2 cost $1500 each (before shipping and taxes) and the others are $899 and $840. That a lot to ask from someone who is too cheap to buy their own computer and is willing to subject themselves to all the advertising and other bullshit that goes with offer like this. I’m convinced that this final section is in there to ensure that no one ever completes the offer.

Looking at the cheapest choice in the group, the “platinum” hosting plan for the year, is simply your average run of the mill hosting plan with arbitrarily high limits. A plan like this from any reputable hosting firm will cost you an average of 8-15 bucks a month. If you don’t think that the limits are arbitrarily high, I’ll tell you that the average Joe’s web page requires much less space and bandwidth to operate.  But in the spirit of competition, I’ll offer this:

I’ll host your (non-porn, non-personal backup) website with 1000% the storage and bandwidth limits advertised on any other hosting companies website, all for 10 bucks a month with no need to prepay!

Hell, I’ll even through in a free domain registration and let you go month to month.  I could offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but somehow that doesn’t seem as cool as saying, “They’re giving you a Gigabyte of storage?  I’ll give you a God damn terabyte!”

So to recap, the ad on facebook is a rip off and scam.  At least they were up front and honest about what you had to do to get the “free” computer, although they certainly didn’t advertise that aspect very much.  If you only read the ad and headlines, it would appear that you are signing up to test different colors of macbook airs.  I’ll take mine in bullshit brown…