Pyramid Scheme Using 1 Cent PayPal Emails to Spread

Individuals seduced by an online pyramid scheme are turning to PayPal to send one-cent spam in an attempt to convince others to buy into an illegal pyramid scheme.

The technique involves sending a single cent through PayPal to a harvested email address. PayPal then sends out a message to that email address, urging the person to sign up for its payment service in order to collect the penny. The sender also gets to include text in the message, which in this case urges a person to visit a website and blindly buy a "gallery" of information so as to get in on the pyramid scheme.

The spam subject line looks something like this: Leanne Carlson has just sent you $0.01 USD with PayPal

The body looks like this:

Amount: $0.01 USD
Note: Dear Friend,

If the enclosed $0.01 pays for one minute of your time, consider yourself engaged.

How to make at least $100,000 in July 2007 AD ?

http://www.thesecret39.com/uncover/leannec005 (ed. note: sometimes the url is from youscoundrelsyou.com)

One of the spammers/pyramid schemers who sent such emails to THREAT LEVEL included one Jason Sullivan, who answered a query about the usefulness of the advertised "gallery":

this thing is eerie the way it worked on me. I SUPPOSE THERE IS
APPROPRIATE CONVINCING that only further investigation can show. I found that most of the gallery was incredibly useful, so much so that I purchased it, only with the strange notion that it as a biz op would be the more profitable use of the gallery.

Support has been extremely helpful, and some of the leads I have used were provided by admin.

These emails seem to be coming from real accounts of individuals who decided to join an illegal pyramid scheme, where you pay $39 to get spamming tools in hopes you can get hundreds of others to pay you $39 for spamming tools.

The best thing you can do if you get one of these messages is report them to PayPal (try [email protected]) and hope their accounts will be frozen and/or canceled.

Though the emails largely seem to be legitimate, and the money is actually in PayPal's system, DO NOT click on any links in the emails. If you want to go to PayPal, type the url into the address bar.

Oh, yes, for those of you who feel tempted: this is not only illegal, it's likely to backfire on you and you'll be out your email address, $39 and maybe your PayPal account. And you'll have become a spammer and a con man to boot.