Beware of free offers

[philpalm]

When there are offers of free stuff, beware of the fine print in the contract.
For instance an offer of a free 4 GB memorystick:
http://www.freememorycard.com/help
But by law tell you that the sponsors pay for the free offer but you have to fill out their questionaire. Some questionaires take a long time and they have ways to verify the sincerity of your answers.

However if you don't have an e-mail account to attract and put all the spam that will get generated, Don't do it.

Yes I snuck the spam into this thread but I am also posting an educational notice of warning....

The part that killed the deal with me:They require you to accept one deal that is not free (they want shipping and handling) and they are trying hard to get a credit card or some kind of credit.

Final say: don't do it, It may be cheaper to buy a 4GB card.....the phone call hassle and spam is not worth it....

[_Em]

To fix the spam problem: use spamgourmet.com. It's a free service -- they harvest the spam data to sell as anonymous data to the enterprise market, and you get a top notch filtering system that is fully under your control. You can set email aliases that expire after x number of uses, you can set up a reply gateway so that you can send responses from your aliases that strip off all your personal IP data, and much more. The emails that get through go to your real email address with a spamgourmet.com flag so you know where they came from. I've been using them for years, and it works perfectly. Each site I send information to gets a unique email address tailored to them, and I can make up the address on the fly without having to create it on spamgourmet.com first :) For example, I'll publish 1srclist.2.adespoton@spamgourmet.com -- the first two people/spambots that send data to that address I just created off the top of my head will get through -- nobody else will. I can log into spamgourmet.com to check and see what email addresses attempted to send mail to that address, however.

As for the "shipping and handling" gotchas -- my rule is never to give out personal data unless the freebie is worth enough to warrant me canceling my credit card if I need to, or it does not require access to my money (only an email address and/or postal address). Whenever signing up for ANYTHING online, make sure that the data you use to sign up is customized so that it is unique to that website. That way, you know who to go after if something goes wrong.