I am fascinated with what I call the “Sucker Circuit” section of the online economy.  The disparity of traffic to income of Sucker Circuit is high, only those at the very top of the chain make the money and those at the very bottom are the ones who fill social media with nonsense to generate “traffic” in the form of clicks,  These coveted “clicks” just hope to get a small percentage of income generated hoping another sucker joins the Sucker Circuit.  Because of this message boards and blogging software has registration counter measures, most free blogging websites are filled with keyword garbage to generate google ranking so that more “clicks” are obtained that they hope will lead to more suckers.

And so on and so on.

I found one sucker on LinkdIn.  He posted like he was a job recruiter (they use photographs of pretty, young women) to lead people to his website.  The fact he owned the website made me think he was more of a middle man in the Sucker Pyramid, but still I was curious about him.

I googled his e-mail address and found out he had been ripped off last year for about 100,000 rupees (almost $1900.00) when he joined a “Get Paid For Surveys” website called aeroliteonline.us.  In fact a lot of people from India got ripped off by them.

What that website offered (it is no longer up) was valid “survey identities” from Western nations because members of those nations get paid small amounts to take marketing surveys (apparently…I know nothing about this as it is really out of my world) but those small amounts are not so small to poor people in India and elsewhere but they do not have valid rich nation identities.  So these sites offer to sell them these identities, and aeroliteonline.us was selling identities for 6500 rupees ($120.00) with the promise of earning 4000 ($74.00) rupees a month per ID.  That means after two months of surveys per ID you make a profit.

The LinkdIn spammer bought fifteen IDs and lost them.  other lost amounts either greater or lesser.  One fellow lost 66 IDs that he was managing in his own pyramid scheme that he made with his friends and family members but unlike the owners of aeroliteonline.us everyone knew where to look for him to ask for their money back.

Needless to say aeroliteonline took everyone’s money and vanished, likely to a similar scam and they will likely prey on the same people, who are perhaps some of the more defenseless people in this world.  I would like to find the people who ran this scam and post their contact information here but I really do not know who they are.  They did not make the common mistakes others make when trying to hide their identities online but rather just blatant mistakes that lead me to nowhere, like claiming to be from Geneva, Ohio in the country of Switzerland.

Remember that the next time you are annoyed by spam or asked to follow a pointless link that there may be someone on another keyboard who paid the equivalent to one year’s wages in their own country for the opportunity to bother you and will probably never get their investment back.  Perhaps if we could learn to do better at thwarting this spam, these people would get out of the Sucker Economy and  join the real economy.