The Experiment Failed… Or did it?
So as you’ve probably guessed by now, the last attempt to make $10,000 in one day failed. There was no promotion of the cause other than just posting it onto digg and waiting. It was more a social network experiment then anything else and wasn’t really expected to work. So today, we do the dirty, underhanded thing - get a community of people fired up to support our cause.
Only we’ll do it the blackhat way.
This will probably feel a bit immoral, so put your seatbelt on.
We start by creating a blog. Put up pictures of someone from istockphoto.com, set up a little bit of a blogging history, maybe a few candid looking shots, and then the post saying something about financial trouble. All he needs is $10,000 to save his home, or 100 people to buy webhosting.
Then it’s time to promote the cause.
Greyhats would start by creating a few fake Myspace profiles and requesting to be friends. This can be automated, of course, and if you’re really blackhat there’s a list of 3,000 Myspace logins and passwords floating around the internet. The majority of them still work, and a few of them have thousands of friends. So you know which we’d use, don’t you?
Selecting 10 accounts from random on the hacked Myspace account list, we come up with just over 11,000 friends. Where are we going with this? A Myspace bulletin to all of our friends (using a DemocraKey, of course). About a cousin who is going to loose his home. All he needs is 10 seconds of your time to save his family. A link to a page asking to digg the article and mail three friends asking for more help.
Now, coming from some random myspace friend, the chances of response would be slim. But coming from close, real friends the Myspace response will probably turn out really well. Around 1% well. And that’s enough to get to the front page of Digg and be seen but at least 70,000 viewers.
And that’s where it starts to get interesting…
It’s no secret that reporters pay attention to what makes front page on Digg. What’s a better story than a guy making $10,000 in one day and saving his family home? Of course it’s going to make the mainstream news. And $10,000 was just the beginning.
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October 7th, 2006 17:52
This doesn’t only feel immoral, it is immoral.
I do have sympathy about your situation, but if you’re really in financial trouble, why are you online? Why are you spending time creating scams instead of working an honest job?
Time to unsubscribe from this site feed.
October 7th, 2006 17:55
None of this was done. It’s a demonstration of how a blackhat would work. Please don’t take it seriously. The last post was done as an experiment. All proceeds would have been donated to charity, only nobody actually bought anything. I’m not in really in dire financial straits.