Brian duped?! No!!

Okay, so here it is in the open -

FreeiPods.com

How dastardly! Devious! Devilish! They've convinced your poor, easily tricked, stupid, short-sighted friend that he might have a slim chance at nabbing a free ipod if he just gets five friends, associates, or random strangers to complete a trial offer from one of FreeiPods.com's affiliates! Demonstrably demonic and all those other words starting with "D"!

Well, I've got news for you. Your friend may be poor and stupid, but I am definitely not short sighted. Actually, I'm far sighted. And as for easily tricked, I'm quite a cunning fellow on the internet, if I do say so myself. I'm a netizen with a nose for scams. So what did I do?

I found out that basically what happens is you sign up, you complete one trial offer from FreeiPods.com's affiliates, and you get five people to do the same. Then they send you your iPod.

I also did my homework on what I initially assumed to be a scam/spam site. Don't get me wrong, I still think there's a possibility that it could be a hoax. But here are the results of my Googling:

Gratis Networks picks up a decent referral fee for every [trial] that’s completed, and since it’s a lot harder than it sounds to also get five of your friends to sign up for AOL (for example), they only have to ship out free iPods to a relatively small percentage of people, while simply pocketing the cash for anyone who is able to only get four people or fewer to sign up (the company rep admitted that they lose money whenever someone gets five people to complete orders, since it means they have to ship out an iPod). Anyway, if you’ve got five friends you can convince to do this who also think they each have five friends they can convince to do this, you might just find yourself just maybe getting a free iPod.
-Engadget Online Magazine

"For the skeptics in the group, I've already done my homework on the company behind this. I pulled Gratis Internet's Dun and Bradstreet report (their financial ranking report and history which is pretty expensive to get) because it's what my company does, and they've been in business for 4 years. They're in the business of "innovative internet advertising" and this is their latest. They've established about $55,000 of credit with various companies (Dell, etc.) over the course of the last 4 years which has been (this is the important part) being repayed in full, on-time to a maximum 8 days late (VERY good ranking for businesses as the industry standard for advertising companies is 9 days). They have no open or closed suits, liens, or judgements against them, meaning nobody's ever had a reason to sue them or bring them to court over late/missing payments. All-in-all they're ranked positively, and the D&B report is one of the most positive you can get on a company. So they're legit, and this is a bonafide marketing tool."
-MIT Electronic Gaming Group Forums, 1st post
(Ironically it's a post detailing how to scam FreeiPods.com out of their iPods)

Some pictures of the iPod some guy recieved. Scroll down a bit to see em. Lots of enthusiastic referrers.
-From the A500 Hacking Forums
(Hey calm down...they're hardware hackers. It's a forum for people who enjoy taking apart their Samsung A500 monitor. What nerds. I'm gonna make a comic in PS about them. Nyah nyah.)

-Ben's Bargain Forums

Here's some guy who's doing the exact same thing I am - trying it out and updating as to whether it works or not. Time will tell. I plan to come back here to see if he's gotten his.
-Forever Geek blog

UPDATE - Z gave me a new link: FreeiPodGuide.com - UPDATE

I encourage you to investigate and play devil's advocate - because I'm still not sure they're for real either. After all, we have no first-hand evidence that this site provides what they say they do. But I am willing to become that evidence. First, though, I need five brave compadres to help me. And by brave, I mean you'll have to complete an offer from FreeiPods.com, you should probably take countermeasures against possible spam, and you will have to choose your trial offer wisely, because I'm not familiar or comfortable with all of them. However, there's one large catch. It's a bombshell, and it looks mighty big and explosive.

A credit card.

If you decide to help me investigate this, you might have to get your parents' consent to use their credit card number. But there are upsides. One, I know which affiliate program can be trusted. Two, there may be a way around the credit card deal, at least with the AOL free trial.

I'll list the affiliates at the bottom, and which ones I would choose for security and cost efficiency. I only accept not paying for anything because I'm a cheap bastard, but some of the trial offers may have something you want. I doubt it.

If you can do this thing, follow the link above or below which is required to let them know I referred you. Then once five people have signed up...

We wait. And we watch. And we get our REJECTED stamps at the ready in case this site is the scam it looks to be.

And if it's not a scam? I get an iPod. And then you have first hand evidence that it works, and can begin your own campaigns.

Affiliate Trial Offers

Here's the lowdown on the trial offers, in a somewhat ridiculing and skeptical fashion -

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Columbia House DVD - Complete this offer by buying 5 DVD's for 49 cents each. Sounds reasonable. Except that it costs money and requires a shipping address. This is a security risk - one, they get to take money out of your credit card, which is unacceptable, and they also get your address, which means they get to send you junk mail. I'm also not familiar with the retail site in question. Their rating? (from ResellerRatings.com) An abysmal 3.75/10. REJECTED! Try again when I'm not sober.

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AOL for Broadband - Complete this offer by signing up for a free AOL trial account. Cost? Nothing for the first 45 days, by which time you can cancel. But you'll still need a credit card...unless these instructions work-

"You can actually use AOL 9.0 with MusicNet without using a creditcard! Just click cancel, and when it offers you 2 months free, click continue, then click cancel again, and when it offers to use your phone bill, click cancel. Then it will take you to the final page! =)"

I actually went through with this option and made an account (TaigerFang - IM me! I love that SN...). When FreeiPods.com said that it was confirmed that I had completed an offer, I cancelled the account, and now all I have left is to refer five other people. This is an ACCEPTABLE method of completing your offer. AOL is a big company and they're professional when it comes to handling your information securely - if they're not, the however-many-millions of people who are signed up get pissed and no one buys AOL. And AOL becomes not happy. Not that anyone wants to be seen using AOL email accounts these days...

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GM Card - Complete this offer by signing up for a GM credit card. What?! A General Motors credit card?! First of all, I'm a minor! Big security/financial risk here. Secondly, GM?! For a credit card?! That's just abnormal. REJECTED!

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Video Professor - Complete this offer by getting "a FREE computer learning cd-rom from the VIDEO PROFESSOR!" Cost efficiency? You have to pay shipping. Those cheap bastards. Security? Well, again with the possible junk mail at your address. Familiarity? Oh, I know this company. It's the company for the dumbasses who think the CD Drive is a handy lil' cup holder. There is no way I'm going to advocate demeaning yourself this way by accepting a instructional cd from a company who abuses caps-lock. REJECTED. How ironically capitalized.

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White Smile - Hey, what's so good about being white? Ahem...anyhow. Cost efficiency? Extremely suspicious. Take a look for yourself:

Get a Million Dollar Smile for Free* with Gleaming White Smile. Gleaming White Smile can be yours Free* with our fantastic trial offer.

What? What the hell? What's with the asterisks next to the word "free?" And what's with the overcapitalization? Only half of those words aren't proper nouns. Sounds very fishy. And the advertisement sounds like way too many spams I've gotten - "Safe, Fast and Effective Teeth Whitening!" except replace "Teeth Whitening" with "Enlargement." If you don't know what I'm talking about, you don't want to. Security is also junkmail, since they can't automagically whiten your teeth from the intarweb. Familiarity/need for this stupid product is way down. Conclusion? REJECTED.

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BMG Music Service - Complete this offer by getting 12 music CDs for the price of one. Unfortunately they don't tell you what choices you have, or their price for one CD. Again you have the junkmail problem, and I've never heard of them. So I turn to my usual resource, ResellerRatings, to see how good these chaps are at running a business, and ResellerRatings tells me, "They suck beyond all human reasoning." Their rating for this six month period? 1.67/10. Let's see what the customers have to say:

"Review: Very Dissatisfied
I find their customer DIS-service to be completely disgraceful, and I will be returning the entire shipment and cancelling my account."

Ouch. Unfortunately, BMG Music Services, you have been REJECTED.

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PetCare RX - Complete this offer by purchasing a minimum of $20.00 in petcare products. Cost efficiency really blows here. I have a rat. I could feed it until it died of old age on table scraps and bird seed. The rest of you really don't seem like pet people, except Yaz, whose pet doesn't really need $20 worth of extra bling bling from a random website. Security? Well, you give them your address in order to recieve your $20's worth of crap. But nothing overly suspicious. Familiarity? I'm not, so let's turn to ResellerRatings...which doesn't have an entry for them because they're petcare and not electronics. Oops. My bad. Let's just say I'm not familiar with them and they're not the first store I turn to when I want pet supplies. I'm sorry PetCare RX, but I'm already with Petsmart. REJECTED.

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eBay - Complete this offer by registering/logging into eBay and bidding on any auction. Notice it says bid, not win. So this doesn't have to cost you anything. Now here's where I get kind of paranoid, because eBay is a sensitive topic for me. I'm not sure why, but my security alarm sensitivity goes WAY UP when I'm dealing with eBay...probably due to all the scams and shady sellers on eBay. There's nothing they could really do with your eBay login information because they would still need your credit card number and other details to cheat you out of your money. Or at least so I think...I avoided this just in case, even though I was about to buy something on eBay anyway. But eBay's a big, recognizable company, and would have the same issues that AOL would have if they sold everyones' information - everyone would stop using eBay. The breakdown? Cost efficiency? You can bid 1 cent on an iPod whose auction is going to expire in two weeks. I guarantee you you'd lose that auction, but you'd still complete the offer. Security? Holy rusted metal, Batman, the alarm is off the charts! Something's probably wrong with it. Familiarity? I've used eBay a lot, and you though you have to watch out for devious sellers, I'm quite comfortable with the service. As far as I've heard, they'll only give up all your account information to the Feds if you sell stuff on eBay. And only if the Feds ask politely. So I assume that this is an ACCEPTABLE method of completing an offer. Just watch out for them gov'ment types.

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And that's all there is to the affiliates.

You can expect updates AS MY INVESTIGATION UNFOLDS...
http://www.freeipods.com/default.aspx?referer=7381124