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Back in the 1980s local telephone carriers across the country set aside the telephone prefix, 976, so that companies and individuals could set up premium phone services where they could charge a high per-minute or per-call rate to anyone calling into these numbers.  

These 976 numbers are exactly like 1-900 numbers except they are generally limited to the local calling area.  So unlike 1-900 numbers which are national these 976 numbers only work within the same area code.  

However these 976 numbers have a big advantage over 1-900 numbers.  The 976 numbers are one easier to dial than 1-900 numbers (both intentionally and accidentally), less people know about 976 numbers and thus don’t realize that they will be charged when they call these numbers, and these 976 numbers appear no different than normal residential or business phone numbers.

So get a 976 number and NOT a 1-900 number, this scam won’t work well with a 1-900 number, but it works great with a 976 number.

Only Still Available in Certain Areas

In some areas 976 numbers are no longer available and have been completely replaced by 1-900 numbers, however these 976 numbers are still available in many local areas.

On the west coast, the 976 service is operated by SBC/Pacific Bell/AT&T Telephone and is known as a ‘local 900 service’.  This service is only offered within the state of California and to California callers.  There is a similar 976 service available in Nevada through Nevada Bell/AT&T Telephone.

In the mid-west, SBC (formerly Ameritech) offers 976 services in Chicago and Detroit.

On the east coast, Verizon operates ‘976′ in a variety of markets. In New York city, Verizon quit the market and ‘976′ transport and billing are operated by smaller private companies in New York Cities.

In the Mid-Atlantic area , Verizon has received permission for the Public Services Commission to cease taking new customers after October 18, 2004. Verizon plans to close 976 operations in Washington, DC and baltimore, MD in June 2005, and in Philadelphia, PA and Pittsburgh, PA in 2006.

Setup the 976 Service

You will need to contact one of the phone companies above and request a 976 number from them.  Setting up this service is no different from setting up a second telephone line.  There is no special equipment required.  It’s normal have a one-time setup fee of around $59-79 depending on your local company and a monthly fee of around $49 which will also give you unlimited local calls.  The charges don’t stop there, they generally also charge you one-third of any of the money that you make from the incoming calls.

Setting up the Per-Call Fees

I prefer charging my callers a per-call fee rather than a per-minute charge.  You need to keep the per-call fee lower than $2 per call.   This is important, don’t be greedy. 

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) requires all 1-900 numbers and 976 numbers which charge more than $2 per-call to provide a free 20-second message at the beginning of the call describing the service, the name of the company providing the service, and the cost of the call. It also must state that anyone under age 18 needs parental permission to complete the call.  You cannot start charging until 3 seconds after this message has been completed, which would bot call your bluff and give them plenty of opportunity to hang up.

But if you charge under $2 per call you are NOT required to provide this message and can immediately charge them as soon as the connection is made.  I would charge them $1.99 per-call to keep it just under $2 to be safe.  Also people are not likely to dispute or even notice a small charge of $1.99 on their phone bill because it is so small. 

Since you are only charging $1.99 per call you will need a high volume of callers to make it worth your wild.

Getting Tons of Callers

There are three easy ways to get callers.

1) Call up people and hang up or make a prank call.  Most people nowadays have caller id so make sure that your number is not blocked and many of these people will return the call without even thinking about it to see who just called them.  Each of them will be charged $1.99 per-call.

2) Get the yellow pages and call businesses such as doctors offices, dentists, and other businesses after business hours.  You will reach their voicemail, answering machines, or answering services.  Leave them a voice message asking them to return your call and give them your 976 number.  You will be surprised how many of them actually do return your call without even thinking about it.

3) Page or text people and ask them to call you at this number.  Some websites offer text spoofing so you can make it seem like the text messages are being sent from this 976 number causing them to assume that it’s just a cell phone number.

Provide a Service

To meet FTC regulations you must provide some sort of service.  You don’t have to go into details about it or the charges since you are charging less than $2 a call, but you must provide something to them.  I would suggest setting up a simple recorded message on an answering machine giving them useless information or either their daily horoscope, any local auto auctions, or on local real estate.  It can be anything, but you need to provide them with something to stay within FTC guidelines - even though most people will just immediately hang up.

How Much Can You Make

For example if you get 1000 callers in a month, you will get a revenue of $1990 and then the phone company will charge you $670 (one-third of your billings) for the service and a $49 monthly fee.  So you will make a profit of $1271 per thousand callers.  Not bad at all!

So 2000 callers will make you a profit of $2542 and 5000 callers will make you $6355.  So you can make quite a bit from this if you get enough callers.  The cool thing is that you leave voice messages for people to call this 976 number from any phone and it doesn’t have to be from the actual 976 number.

This scheme works really well and it can make great money for you if you pull it off correctly.

Recently websites have been popping up all over the internet advertising forex trading like it’s the hottest online craze since the invention of viagra.

Forex trading is also known as currency or foreign exchange trading and it involves trading one currency for another. This is the largest financial market in the world with an average daily currency trade of US$3.21 trillion. Forex trading is really risky and there are tons of scam forex trading websites that rip people off. Even through legitimate forex trading 90% of currency traders lose money.

So I want to introduce a new type of forex trading where you are almost guaranteed to make money. Sound too good to be true, it’s not.

STEP ONE: Always Buy Low

With this form of forex trading you invest in coinage from other countries that is the exact same size but less valuable than specific American coinage.

These low-valued foreign coins can be obtained at overseas, at some banks, at foreign exchange counters, or at foreign coin stores.

Below are some low-valued foreign coins (worth less than a penny each) that could be used in American vending machines:

American Quarter:

  Icelandic five-auran (worth 0.0008 cents each)
Uruguayan ten-céntimos (worth 0.0046 cents each)
Mexican ten-centavos (worth 0.009 cents each)
Danish fiveore (worth 0.0098 cents each)
Pervuian twenty-céntimos (worth 0.6 cents each)

American Dime:

Trinidad penny (worth 0.0016 cents each)
Malaysian penny (worth 0.003 cents each)

STEP TWO: Always Sell High

These low valued foreign coins can either be used to purchase goods from American vending machines or even exchanged for the more valuable American coins of the exact same size. The coin return button on some vending machines will give you the lowest coin in the internal coin hopper for a particular coin type which is usually different than the actual coins that you had dropped into the machine.

Try looking at the date of a quarter that you drop into a soda machine, then hit the coin return button and wait for the coin to drop into the change return area - look at the date again and you will probably notice that its a totally different quarter than the one that you put into the machine.  These type of machines can be used for exchanging your foreign coins into more valuable American coins.

You could also cash these coins in using Coinstar or Coinmaster at your local supermarket however they charge a fee of 8.9 cents per every dollar cashed in using their machines. They have the option of cashing in your coins for a giftcard for free so this may be a convenient way of exchanging your foreign currency into more valuable American coins.

I would advise against trying to use these foreign coins at casinos since many newer slot and video poker machines have security measures in place to catch people using foreign coins. I would also avoid using these coins at the post office or at other federal facilities.

However, you could even cash these coins in at your local banks. It’s rather easy, take the very cheap foreign couns that are the same size as quarters.  Get a paper coin wrapper. Wrap a few real quarters on the ends but fill the rest of the roll with the cheap foreign coins. Wrap the roll and with felt-tip pen write some phony account number on it to add an element of authenticity. Take the roll of coins into the targeted bank. If you dress like a business person and go at a busy time, especially with the account number written on each roll, and the rolls in a bank sack or your briefcase, the teller will probably give you ten dollars per roll without checking. The only downside to this convenient method is that the entire transaction will be captured by the banks cameras.

Guaranteed Profits

Since the low-valued foreign coins listed above have a value of less than one cent each. You will be making 24-25 cents for every coin that you cash as a quarter and 9-10 cents for every coin you cash in as a dime. A roll of quarters is worth ten dollars each and a roll of dimes is worth five dollars each.

With the holiday season in swing and with tons of people going out drinking at all the hotels, bars, restaurants, and night clubs I have noticed lots of empty beer kegs all over the place.  Many restaurants and bars keep their empty kegs out back between their dumpster and their grease trap.  The kegs are empty, right?  So why not keep them next to the worthless garbage?  

They fail to realize that these kegs have a $10 deposit on each of them and that they can be returned to just about any large beverage distributer for $10 each regardless of whether or not they were originally purchased from them.  So would you leave a stack of $10 bills behind your restaurant near the garbage?  That’s essentially what they are doing.

So it would be really easy for someone to take these kegs since they are leaving them out near the garbage (sometimes even in shared or public areas) and return them at the local beverage center for $10 each.

Another crazy thing is that beer kegs only have a $10 deposit, but they cost about $150 to make and they can be sold at scrap yards for as much as $15-$35.  So it may be possible to actually purchase the empty kegs for $10 each and then sell them as scrap metal for even more money.  According to the beer institute this type of practice costs the industry as much as $50 million a year.

They have even considered raising the deposit amount from $10 to $30 to prevent people from selling their empty beer kegs rather than returning them.  See the following article: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3244421 for details on this.  So it may even make even sense to hold onto these empty beer kegs that are now worth $10 each (deposit value) until this increase takes place and raises the deposit value on kegs to $30. 

I was amazed at the fact that so many bars, restaurants, hotels, and night clubs leave their empty kegs (worth $10 each) near the garbage, but I was totally baffled at the fact that the entire beer keg industry would only require a $10 deposit for something worth as much as $150 and that could be sold elsewhere for as much as $35.  This could totally set someone up to start a business where they purchase kegs for $10 each and sell them for $35 each for a whopping 250% return on each or even as little as $25 each for a 150% return which is still not bad. 

As it stands right now, there is lots of money to be made from the faulty practices and standards with the keg return industry.

Go to all the cellphone stores in your area, sign up all the demo phones for your very own premium SMS text service, and make $9.99 per demo phone!  Find out how.

Every now and then I receive a random text message on my cell phone.  Sometimes it’s a horoscope reading, sometimes it’s a random stock pick, sometimes it’s a weather report and other times its just some advertising spam. 

I initially thought that it was just an annoyance so I would simply either ignore or delete the message.  I bet the majority of people have the same type of reaction in this situation.

However sometimes the messages reoccur and other times they do not.

Either way at the end of the month I recieve my cell phone bill only to find that I have an additional $4.99 charge for a “third-party” service!

I call up my cell phone company and ask them what this charge is for and they tell me that’s it either a subscription or one-time text messaging service.  They go on to tell me that I can’t cancel through them or get a refund because these charges are from a third-party company and not my actual cellphone carrier.

They simply tell me to reply to all further text messages with the words: STOP or CANCEL to prevent these text messages from reoccurring.  This will cancel the service from here on out, but it will not refund any current or previous charges.

So what does this mean?  This means that you will still be charged for the initial text message regardless of whether you cancel the service immediately and that this “third-party” company could be getting anywhere between 99 cents and $9.99 for sending you this single text message.

I checked my previous cell phone bills from past months only to find that there were similar charges those months that I did not even notice! 

Initially this made me angry, but once I thought about this ingenious business model, I immediately wanted in! 

I bet that at least 70% of the people who receive these type of text messages don’t even notice that they are being charged for these extra services and just pay their bills. 

Background

This type of service is known as Reverse SMS billing or a premium SMS service where companies can bill a user through an SMS text.  This even goes beyond just charging for text messages.  Services like PayPay or GPay allows people to send and transfer money via SMS. People can also charge money to their cell phone account with similar types of services.

Where this money goes

I did some research on this type of third-party text message billing and found that these companies make between half to a third of what they bill, the cell phone company takes one-third and the payment gateway service also gets one-third.

So if they charge 99 cents per month and bill 30,000 people they will be making approximately $10,000 per month.

If they bump this up to $4.99 per month they will be making over $45,000 per month.

So how do YOU set up this type of service?

Companies like Telemedia and TextMarks allow people to set up their own text messaging services for free.

Textmarks is the easiest service to use and allows people to set up a keyword for use on their short code of 41411.

You could set up the keyword, MakeMoney, and when anyone sends an SMS text with the word, MakeMoney, to 41411. They would be signed up for your premium SMS service for either $4.99 or $9.99 per month depending what you want to charge for your service.

Now the difficulty is advertising and getting people to sign up for your keyword.  Unless you want to go the spamming route like many companies do.

Bulk SMS messaging

There are services out there like ClickaTell which allows users to send bulk SMS messages to thousands or perhaps millions of cellphone users.

You could also write a web-based application to do bulk PC-to-Phone SMS texting. 

To stop the use of spamming some of the premium SMS services requires all potential subscribers to reply with a “Y” indicating that they actually understand the charges and want to subscribe to the service.  However, this could potentially be countered and defeated with SMS text spoofing or by writing a web-based application to sign people up for your text service regardless of whether or not they have actually willingly subscribed.

Signing tens-of-thousands of people up for your premium SMS service requires a bit work however it could be highly rewarding and bring in thousands of dollars per month.  However there is an easier way to make a couple hundred per month with much less time and work involved.

Bill the Cellphone Companies Back

Go to all the cellphone stores in your area and sign up all the demo phones for your premium SMS text service! 

In my immediate area there are 3 Sprint/Nextel Stores, 4 AT&T stores, 4 Verizon stores, 3 T-Mobile Stores, and 1 Helio Store.  These 15 cell phone stores had a total of 328 active demo phones that I was able to sign up for my $9.99 a month service.

After the cellphone companies take their cut (~33%) and the premium SMS billing gateways take their cut (~33%).  I am left with $3.00 per subscriber, not too bad, but not great.  Better than nothing though!  So with 328 subscribers at $3.00 per month I am making an easy $984.00 per month.  That’s a decent car payment (this may even cover rent for some people)! 

The Process:
1) Sign up for a shortcode keyword.
2) Set your keyword for premium billing (either $4.99 or $9.99 per month).
3) Go to your local cellphone store and use all the demo phones to text your keyword to their 41411 short code.
4) Clear out all inboxed and sent text messages from phones.
5) Repeat this process at more cellphone stores.
6) Wait for them to mail you a check for approx $1.50 per subscriber ($4.99) or $3.00 per subscriber ($9.99). The more subscribers you have the more you make!

I am billing the cellphone companies back and they are paying for it!  I got my
first check last month.

And things are just getting started…

If I head further into the bay area there are hundreds of cell phone stores with thousands of demo phones so my subscriber list is sure to increase!  I can sign up more phones at my leisure.

Also, the cellphone companies get new phones every few months so this would allow me to return to these stores and sign up all their new phones for my premium service.  Things are just getting better and better!

So what is your take on these premium SMS scam ideas?

Today is December 26th, the day after Christmas, the day where the majority of retail stores brace for large numbers of store returns.  People receive presents for Christmas that they do not want, that are the wrong size, or that they already have so they go to the store where they are purchased and then either exchange them or return them for cash. 

Sometimes stores offer a gift receipt, other times there is no receipt, however many high-end retail stores do not require receipts on returns especially for people who have a line of credit with this retail store.

Make a Quick $100 with a little Return Scam

So what if you buy an item from the factory outlet store at a discounted price and then return it to a high-end retail store for full price?

Chelsea Premium Outlets is the largest operator of premium factory outlet malls across the United States.  They have a mall in Petaluma, Napa, and Vacaville in the bay area (just to name a few).  They have high end stores such as Fendi, Nautica, Coach, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Ralph Lauren, Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Perry Ellis, Gucci, etc and thousands of others.  They offer regular mechandise at discounted prices and frequently have sales on these discounted prices for even more savings. 

Here are some examples:

Polo Black Cologne Set w/4.2 oz cologne and deodorant.
$69.78 retail price
$30.00 factory outlet store price w/40% off sale
——————-
$39.78 difference

Coach Soho Purse.
$289.99 retail price
$189.00 factory outlet store price w/20% off sale
——————-
$100.00 difference

If there are no factory outlets near you.  You can always purchase items from an online store or off of ebay for a discounted price.

The next step is to head down to an expensive shopping district such as Union Square in San Francisco, Times Square in NYC, or even your local shopping mall and then return the merchandise purchased at the outlet mall, online, or off of ebay for full price.

Stores such as Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales, Macy’s, Nordstroms, Filenes, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Sephora have very lenient return policies where they will accept returned merchandise without a receipt and sometimes even without the actual box.  I have only encountered a small amount of questioning and resistence when making these types of returns.  It may help if you show them a charge card from their store especially a high-end platinum card, but most of the time this is not necessary.  They will often make the return without any questions and give you cash.  If they ask questions you can always tell them that you either lost the receipt or that it was a gift and there never was a receipt.

Using this trick you can make a quick and easy $100 or even more!  I made my quick $139.78 today.   Shhh!  Don’t tell them that I told ya, tho.  It’s our little secret, ok?

A really curious thing happened to me a few years ago after I bought coffee from a local cafe. I handed the cashier a $20 bill and she gave me a few bills back in change. I noticed that one of the $1 bills with “WheresGeorge.com” stamped all over it. 

I immediately thought that this was a brilliant marketing idea.  Just imagine how many people would see this stamped bill as it changed hands countless times from person-to-person.  One stamped bill has the potential of being circulated to thousands of different people all over the world during it’s lifetime.

This concept was not new to me.  Back in middle school my friends and I were into playing jokes on one another involving prank phone calls.  We would do things such as call all the doctors and dentists in the phone book and leave messages on their answering machine or with their answering service and give them a friends name and phone number.  The next day they would get calls from tons of dentists and doctors - all day long.   We later came up with the idea of writing a girls name and a male friends phone number “Jenny xxx-xxx-xxxx” on dollar bills with a heart next to it.  In the upcoming weeks, months, and years he would get countless calls from callers asking to speak to Jenny.  It was hysterical!

I know I had run across one of the estimated 103 million bills stamped with WheresGeorge.com before, but this time I was really curious.  I had initially thought that this might be a political site about George Bush, but it turned out to be a site that tracks bills as they float across the country and beyond.

I was far more concerned with whether or not this viral form of guerilla marketing a website’s URL on currency is legal or not — because if it is, I’m all over it!

Is this Legal?

Hank Eskin, the WheresGeorge.com brainchild pictured above, says people tell him all the time that defacing dollar bills is illegal. But he claims it is not, as long as the money is still spendable. 

The treasury’s website  states that it’s illegal to deface or damage money to the point of it’s being unusable so that painting the whole thing with black paint would be illegal (but painting only one side could be argued to be legal).

Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, agreed with Eskin, as quoted in The New York Times she said, “According to the laws as they stand now, the practice is not illegal.

 ”Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

Now it’s also illegal to alter a bill/coin in such a way as to change it’s face or collector’s value (such as tearing corners off a $20 and taping them to a $1, a very cheap and yet sometimes quite successfull way of counterfeiting, or to change a common coin to look like a rarer one) but these fall under fraud statutes and isn’t really what’s being discussed here
anyways.

As long as the dollar can still be used as a dollar (even if it’s in pieces, the bank can still replace it for a whole one and send that one to be destroyed) and there’s no fraud intended, it’s legal.

Stop Selling the Stamps

Yet the Secret Service reportedly hassled Hank Eskin to stop selling the WheresGeorge.com stamps that are still being sold by other people, saying that was using money for free advertising.

And Jim Mackin, an agent assigned to public affairs in the Washington office of the Secret Service, told the St. Louis Dispatch in 2002 that: “We would discourage anyone from participating in such a scheme.”

Mackin said that violators who are caught are told to cease and desist - and usually do to avoid legal action.

Making Money with Money

All of this back and forth between the Secret Service and these websites has not stopped WheresGeorge.com and all its imitators and followers from tracking currency as bills make their way across the globe.

Seeing as though I’m more obsessed lately with how much money bloggers and webmasters are making, I tried to track down Eskin’s income from WheresGeorge.com, since I noticed he’s running Google Adsense ads on the site.

What I did find were WheresGeorge.com’s advertising rates, which give information about the site’s pageviews and how much they charge in terms of CPM — or cost per thousand impressions.

Putting these numbers into a Google spreadsheet.  I was able to discover that WheresGeorge.com could be pulling in anywhere from $7,600 (the presold WheresGeorge.com advertising space not listed as immediately available) up to $43,320 per month — the revenue generated if all available slots were sold.

Not bad for Eskin, who says WheresGeorge.com is mainly a fun habit, and that he’s not selling anything. And while the income generated by the site has been said to cover the cost of servers and other hosting expenses, I’d bet you anything that WheresGeorge.com’s money is covering a whole lot more than this now, years later.

Good for Eskin for coming up with a fascinating and ingenius approach to free website marketing.

Check out the video below for the firsthand story behind the government’s reaction to his website.

This concept is like having a business card that is guaranteed to get passed around from person-to-person until it falls apart.  People can throw out business cards, but they will NEVER throw out money, regardless if it’s a $1 bill or a $100 bill it will definitely be circulated to hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world.

So if you want an awesome idea to promote your website for FREE then follow this approach, use money to make money and put your money to work for you!  Stamp your site’s URL on dollar bills, spend the money like you would normally, and watch your “direct link/bookmark” traffic increase. 

The following credit card promotions below are offering $100 cash rewards or gift cards simply for signing up for a credit card with their company. You can easily cancel the card after you activate and receive your reward without any cost or obligation.

If you need a credit card for Christmas Shopping it may make sense to get one of these reward cards to take advantage of the rewards offered by these programs.

The Citi® Professional Card offers you 0% APR on all purchases for 9 months and no annual fee, so you can borrow money for FREE for 9 months and then keep the card for FREE as well as get the $100 bonus Gift Card.

The American Express® Preferred Rewards Gold Card gives you 0% APR on all purchases for 12 months and is fee free for the first year so you can borrow money for FREE on this card PLUS get a $100 Gift Card as an added bonus.

The American Express® Starwood Preferred Guest Card gives you 2.9% APR on all purchases and is fee free for the first year, but it offers better hotel and airlines rewards than the other cards. So it only makes sense to get this card if you plan on using it for it’s travel rewards. It aso has the $100 Gift Card as an added signon bonus like the others.

Citi Professional Card - Get a $100 Gift Card

Citibank is offering 10,000 bonus ThankYou Points after your first purchase that can then be redeemed for a $100 gift card.

You also get 3 ThankYou Points for every dollar you spend on purchases at restaurants, gas stations, on auto rentals and at certain office supply merchants and 1 point for every dollar you spend on other purchases. These points can be redeemed for air travel, statement credit, gift cards and certificates, merchandise or to create your own reward.

Note: If you have a pop-up blocker, turn it off temporarily. Now click on the application link above, and then try to close the window by hitting the X. You may score an pop-up offer for 5,000 extra ThankYou points, for a total of $150 in gift cards!

American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Card - Get a $100 Gift Card

 American Express is offering 10,000 Membership Rewards® Bonus points after your first purchase which is good for a $100 Gift Card at a variety of different merchants.

With this card you are also eligible for their Membership Rewards Program and various other offers.

NOTE: This card has no annual fee for the first year, but does carry a $125 annual fee if you have the card over 12 months.

American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Card - Get a $100 Gift Card

Another offer from American Express is the Starwood Preferred Guest Card which is currently giving out 10,000 Starwood points after your first purchase. That’s enough for a $100 Gift Card to Amazon.com, Gap, Nordstrom, Banana Republic, and over a hundred other preferred merchants.

These 10,000 points are also good for up to 3 free nights at Starwood hotels like Four Points Sheraton. If you like airline miles, you can get 1.25 frequent flier miles per point, 25% more than other airline-specific cards and use them at over 30 different airlines without any blackout dates! This card is great for people who like to travel and make the most of their existing frequent flier miles!

NOTE: This card has no annual fee for the first year, but does carry a $125 annual fee if you have the card over 12 months.

I signed up for all three of these cards and promply received my $100 Reward Card for each within 14 days of activating my card.  The Citibank card only took only days to show up.  I would recommend doing this for anyone with good credit.  It took me very little time to sign up for all three cards above, receive them in the mail, activate them, receive my reward gift cards for $100 each, and then cancel all three cards.

The total cost was $0 and less than 2 hours of time.  The total reward was $300.