Chain Letters, Electronic or Otherwise, are not legal. First of all, I want to point out that no matter what the scam artist tells you in the letter, these little schemes ARE NOT LEGAL, and people HAVE done jail time over them. For example, Dave Rhodes spent a number of years in a Federal Prison (and may still be there for all I know) for his starting of this whole scheme electronically back in the days of the Bulletin Board Services instead of the internet. Whether disguised as a "mailing list," "selling recipes," a "free loan," "selling reports," a "gifting club," "lottery ticket club," or any of a hundred other thin veils, they are still chain letters, and still illegal.

Those of you who may have come to these pages because one of the moronic letters actually uses my URL to supposedly validate that it is legal have a big surprise coming to you. Yes, it's still illegal, even though the Kick Financial Butt variant claims it's legal and points you here as "proof." The author of that one is as big a scam artist and fool as all the others.

In addition, virtually every ISP (Internet Service Provider) out there will either suspend or terminate your account for pepetuating these illegal items. They violate the laws in every country that they have ever been reported to, as well as all areas of netiquette.

A special note on the "Lottery Ticket Club" scam: The lottery ticket club not only violates ponzi pyramid scam & chain letter laws, but Federal Interstate Gambling laws which make it illegal to send lottery tickets by mail across state lines (also backed up by many State laws) as well - and the argument "they are not being sold, they are gifts" won't cut it in court, since they are the "fee" for being a member of the "club." And while those running the scam stay safe basing their scam in Israel, the members of the "club" are wide open for prosecution.

You will also, within minutes of posting one of these scams, be reported not only to your ISP but to the US Postal Inspector's Service, the Federal Trade Commission, the IRS (or the equivalent of those agencies in your country), the police, and any other agencies that might have any sort of a jurisdiction over this kind of thing in your country.

Your mailbox (if your ISP does not immediately terminate you) will be filled with email, everything from polite information that these are not legal to hate filled letters full of obscenities. If there is any way to trace you (and don't sell the information capacity of the Internet short - you can find virtually anything about anyone), your phone will begin to ring and you will be harrassed by people calling at all hours of the day and night in retribution. No, it's not right - it is never right to abuse others in response to abuse - but it WILL happen. Guaranteed. Your real name and address will be published by those who find it out so that others can harrass you as well.

Also, these scams just do not work because of the mathematical impossibility of them. If you took just one of these letters, and ran it through 13 cycles at the claimed response rate, you would exceed the population of the earth. Also, if you are making $50,000 (or whatever that letter claims that you will make "sharing the wealth," that means that 50,000 people had to lose $1 so that you could gain that dollar.

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