Beware of Chain Letters Scam

Chain letters are illegal.

Chain letters are a waste of time.
Net sites which do not discourage electronic chain letters risk losing their net connections, as they have the potential for wasting great amounts of bandwidth and disk space.

What are chain letters?

Chain letters are letters which promise a phenomenal return on a small effort. The simplest form of a chain letter contains a list of x people. You are supposed to send something to the top person on the list. Then you remove the top person on the list, sliding the second person into the top position, add yourself in the bottom position, make y copies of the letter, and mail them to your friends. The promise is that you will eventually receive y**x somethings in return.

Why do people think chain letters could work?

The reason people are even tempted by these schemes is that the human mind does not have an intuitive view of geometrical progressions. Suppose we presume the chain letter to have a list of five people. You are asked to send one postcard to the person on top of the list, and remail the letter to five friends. You are promised thousands of postcards from all over the world if everyone participates. Your cost: a postcard, five photocopies and envelopes, and six stamps. Not much to risk to see what comes back...

Why can't chain letters work?

Now let's assume that everyone on the list is honest and just perpetuating the "chain." (After all, these letters do emhpasize being HONEST.) Then if everyone on the list has made five copies, you are one of 5**5 or 3,125 people receiving copies in your "generation" of the letter. So far, the numbers don't seem outlandish. And looking the other way, you stand to get postcards from 3125 people. That doesn't seem impossible either. But view it as the "chain" you're in the middle of, and there will be 5**11 or 48,828,125 people receiving copies in that generation of the letter. If distribution were confined to the United States, there wouldn't be enough people left who hadn't already received a copy for the next generation.

A brief analysis of the Dave Rhodes chain letterThe Dave Rhodes chain letter is a famous example of electronic chain letter which has appeared several times on the Internet. It has a list of 10 people and suggests you forward the letter to to bulletin boards (not people)! A twist with this letter is that you start to receive money when you get to position 5 on the list. Just assume for this analysis that only the person who posted the message you read was honest (that is, just making copies and passing it along - not in on the beginning). Let's see how the generations go until you could see some results: Copies in Your
generation postion

10 --
100 10
1,000 9
10,000 8
100,000 7
1,000,000 6
10,000,000 5

So by the time you could get any money out of this, the message would have appeared on over 11 milion bulletin boards! Do you think there are that many? Even if we were only talking people, that would be a healthy number. There aren't enough people in the US (let alone bulletin boards) to maintain two more generations.