The original "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" letter was written around 1988 by a person who used the name Dave Rhodes. Biographical details are not certain, and it is not clear that this is even the person's actual name. It is often said, such as in the FAQ for the net.legends Usenet group, that Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College, a Christian college in Maryland, who wrote the letter and uploaded it as a text file to a nearby BBS around 1987. It is also often said that Rhodes was convicted of some fraud-related crime and that as part of his sentence he had to create an anti-spam website, but no evidence of this has been found. Sites that appear to be such a site, for example http://daverhodes.etee2k.net, are apparently hoaxes.The scam reached the Internet, where it was forwarded over e-mail and Usenet, although it was not until spamming became a major problem in 1994 that "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" exploded. It became one of the most persistent spams in existence and multiple variations have come into existence, often by spammers who change the subject of their email to "This really works!" or "You are a winner!"
The letter encouraged readers of the email to forward one dollar in cash to a list of people provided in the text, and to add their own name and address to the bottom of the list after deleting the name and address at the top. Using the theory behind pyramid schemes, the resulting chain of money flowing back and forth would supposedly deliver a reward of thousands of dollars to the ones participating in the chain, as copies of their chain spread and more and more people sent one dollar to their address.The text of the letter originally claimed to be "perfectly legal", citing Title 18, U.S. Code, Sections 1302 (which deals with postal lotteries) and 1341 (which deals with mail fraud). The U.S. Postal Inspection Service cites 18 USC 1302 when it asserts the illegality of chain letters, including MMF: [Chain letters are] illegal if they request money or other items of value and promise a substantial return to the participants. Chain letters are a form of gambling, and sending them through the mail (or delivering them in person or by computer, but mailing money to participate) violates Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute.It also asserts that "[r]egardless of what technology is used to advance the scheme, if the mail is used at any step along the way, it is still illegal."[6] The U.S. Postal Inspection Service asserts the mathematical impossibility that all participants will be winners, as well as the possibilities that participants may fail to send money to the first person listed, and the perpetrator may have been listed multiple times under different addresses and names, thus ensuring that all the money goes to the same person.As of this writing, few chain letters use the U.S. mails to transmit the money. A common chain letter suggests that the participant transfer $6 using the Paypal electronic funds transfer service to send $1 to each of 6 people. However, the mathematical impossibilities of the claims noted in the U.S. Postal Inspection Service blurb survives the change in medium and pyramid schemes are still illegal in most places around the world, possibly as investment frauds or consumer frauds or illegal lotteries.Paypal prohibits its use for payment of membership in pyramid schemes.
E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail, is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk."UCE" refers specifically to unsolicited commercial e-mail.E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against spam have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in e-mail. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008[update]) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. Since the cost of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising.E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of spam through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court. Spam averages 94% of all e-mail sent.From the beginning of the Internet (the ARPANET), sending of junk e-mail has been prohibited, enforced by the Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy (ToS/AUP) of internet service providers (ISPs) and peer pressure. Even with a thousand users junk e-mail for advertising is not tenable, and with a million users it is not only impractical, but also expensive. It is estimated that spam cost businesses on the order of $100 billion in 2007. As the scale of the spam problem has grown, ISPs and the public have turned to government for relief from spam, which has failed to materialize.
