DAVE RHODES:
                                       
   
   
   In every Paradise there is at least one fatal flaw. In every mail
   system, there is sooner or later a chain letter. UseNet, luckily,
   seems to have been adopted by only one such - but it pops up in more
   places and faster than kudzu, and is about as hard to kill completely.
   Actually, nobody currently knows much about Dave Rhodes (but see
   below) - except that he wrote the template for the first
   MAKE.MONEY.FAST pyramid scheme. His name and address have long since
   fallen off the top of any of the current copies... There is something
   of a miniFAQ available on this post.
   
   Advice to new netters panting to try it out and make $50,000 in an
   afternoon: I can tell you right now what you're gonna get - an
   extremely full emailbox, a ticked-off sysadmin (because your emailbox
   is full of letter bombs from irate UseNetters who snapped at seeing
   this cr*p in their newsgroups for the fifth time in two weeks, and
   because several thousand *un*snapped-as-yet UseNetters email her
   directly saying "Talk to this kid; it's illegal, a waste of time, and
   annoying), and a rapidly-vanishing UseNet access (wave bye-bye to it
   for a looooong time, if you're not lucky...). The letter itself says
   it's legal, you say? It's lying; it's known as a Ponzi or pyramid
   scheme, and is wire fraud for sending the letter, and postal fraud for
   receiving any of the money thru the U.S. Mail (can you say Federal
   Case, boys'n'girls?)...
   
   And you have to leave a trail directly to yourself, name and address -
   or else it can't work (hee hee)... Save yourself the grief: just say
   NO to Dave.Rhodes . Recently voted number one on list of people every
   UseNetter would like to see die an excruciatingly slow and painful
   death. If we're lucky, it does not get posted at all (for a day or
   two). Contrib. post:
   
   Dave Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park,
   MD. This is a Seventh Day Adventist college. The posting machine was
   !cucstud, aka Columbia Union College, Student. It passed news upstream
   to uunet. Cucstud was a 3B2, and there were two or three more. Note
   this predated the widespread usage of the pseudodomain of { }.UUCP,
   and I don't recall if the site was ever so named.
   
   Needless to say, Leroy Cain, the sysadm, was not amused. This posting
   was made in 1987-1988, sometime just after the infamous jj@portal one,
   and his incoming mail queue was impressive.
   
   I do not know if Leroy took the matter to the Dean of Students, but do
   know he posted an apology, and ensured that Dave would not be doing
   that again, at least at THAT site.
   
   As for why I had an account on cucstud, and knew Leroy, when my only
   connection was that I caught a bus to work in front of the place every
   morning; that's a different story........
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   I like what Dogbert had to say about chain letters:
   
   "Don't you think that for your first crime you shouldn't attach your
   name and address and mail it to several thousand strangers?"
     _________________________________________________________________
   

[Evidence has since turned up that the Dave Rhodes letter has been circulating,
in snail-mail form, long before that fateful day in 1987 or 1988... ah well...]

   
     _________________________________________________________________
   
  Additional info
  
   This information has been added to this WEB page only. It is not part
   of the original net.legends FAQ.
   
   Additional information is available at cathouse.org.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   Go to Next Entry -- Back to Table of Contents