Idiot's Guide to a Free (or heavily discounted) Lunch

We've all seen them - pop-ups and banner ads telling us that if we just click and follow their link, that we're entitled to a free iPod. Well one day I decided that I was tired of the spammers, and it was time to get mine. I'd heard of people actually doing these things and getting iPods out of it, but it still seemed kinda shady. So I did some research, figured out the system, and how to say...get around it.

Before we get started, please allow me to cover my own ass: this guide is a purely a work of fiction written for your own amusement. If you choose to follow any of these steps or take any action, it's all on you. I take no responsibility for your actions. So if you end up losing a lot of money, don't come crying to me - because I'll just call you an idiot. If these steps do work and end up getting you something nice, then send me a card or something.

Okay, there are two types of "Free" Stuff sites out there, the referral sites and the offer sites. With the referral sites, you have to complete usually one offer, then convince [read: CON] some number of other people to sign up under your name, and each of them must complete one offer. Only then will you get your free gift. The number of referrals needed varies with the value of the gift. For the iPod nano example, that's 5 other people.

As an aside, you're probably asking what these "offers" are. Essentially, they're selling subscriptions. Subscriptions to things like Earthlink, AOL, TrimLife, etc. Also, a lot of these "Offers" are Credit Card sign-ups. I urge you right off the bat to stay the hell away from the Credit Card offers, as there's no point screwing up your credit on something silly like this.

Back to the point. The second type of site, one where you can complete all the offers yourself and not get your poor friends involved, is what we're going to look at today. But before we go off completing offers, let's see what all is involved in getting this done. You'll need the following [don't get them yet, we'll cover that in steps.]

1. Make two email accounts
2. A pre-paid Visa debit card and an address [duh]
3. An account at an Offer site
4. Patience and the ability to keep some things in order
5. A telephone, thick skin, and determination

All in all, this whole deal will probably cost you about 2-5 hours of your time, and somewhere between $0-30. But it's worth it.

Okay, now let's get into the nitty gritty. Steps that you need to take are in bold, the rest is all just text that explains why you're doing it. For the love of God, read the whole article a couple times before you do ANYTHING.

Why two email accounts? One's your normal email account which you check on a daily basis. We'll use this one to store all the account information, cancellation numbers, dates, and other pertinent information, and for the sake of the article, this is your PRIMARY email account. The other account we'll use for the offer site, to sign up with and to complete offers with. This should be a free email account [Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc] and will be referred to as the SECONDARY account in this article.

1. Open the secondary email account at the free-email provider of your choice. IMPORTANT DETAIL: Pick a different name (ie one other than your own) to register this email under and keep the login name simple. Don't provide a home address if you don't have to. For example, you could chose to register the name "Albert Richardson", so a good login name would be "albertrichardson@[somesite].com". KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Remember this name! This is the name we will be doing business under. So don't pick something dumb. You're going to probably have to say it on the phone a couple times. A name like "Larry Hugepenis" will probably raise eyebrows. The wrong eyebrows.

2. IMMEDIATELY record the login, password, account name, address, or whatever pertinent information about the two email accounts you just made into a text file or email. This email/text should be saved on your primary email account or anywhere else that you will be absolutely sure that you can keep safe. I highly recommend using Google's GMail for your primary here, as the search features will come in handy.

Now that we've got the email accounts and our name of choice all set up, time to move to big item #2.

A pre-paid Visa debit card:
This really is the brains behind making all this work. The way that these offer companies can afford to give you free iPods and Xboxes and the like is that companies pay them to get people to subscribe to their services. Usually under the auspices of a "Free Trial" period. Free for 30 days, and then they bitchslap you with $30/month, hoping that you forget to cancel. When you do call to cancel, they harass you to get you to try to stay - but we'll go over that later. So what is the point in the pre-paid Visa card? To keep your ass out of trouble. You will indeed call to cancel all these subscriptions in due time, but since about 100% of them require a Credit Card to sign up, something always feels a bit fishy. What if one of these companies is less than scruplous and tries to take your money DESPITE the fact that you've cancelled their services? Now you see the problem! We're dealing with people who pay spammers to push their material in a shady way. Why would you trust that? Exactly. So the pre-paid Visa card is our way of watching our own backs.

3. Order a pre-paid Visa debit card. I suggest one from Simon Malls. I picked an Indiana one. IMPORTANT DETAIL: Remember to use the NAME that you used in step #1 [in our case, Albert Richardson]. HOWEVER, use whatever address that you would want your prize [iPod/Xbox/whatever] mailed to. How much to put on? Personally, I think that $40 is a nice amount. Oh, and when you get to shipping options during checkout, make sure that you find the option to send it to the BUYER (that's you, with your real name, with your real address - which should be the SAME address for the card that you're ordering) and not to ship it to the RECIPIENT.

4. Again, IMMEDIATELY record all the details of this account [Name/Address/Birthdate/Phone #(use your cell phone if you have one)/etc] to your trusted primary email account. You're gonna need this stuff later.

So you're asking why so much money? Why waste $40 of your hard-earned dollars? Well, when you initially complete an offer, you can be charged anywhere from $1 [to check if the account is valid, usually on "Free" offers] to $15 for your subscriptions. Ideally you'll be able to get all of that back, but you should go into this fully aware that you could lose every penny of this money. Consider this your capital investment towards the future goal. Personally, a loss of up to $25 would seem fine to me.

You're going to have to wait a week or two for this card to come in the mail. Don't bother doing anything till it's in your hands. Come back when it's arrived.

[Pause a week.]

Okay, now you've gotten the hard copy of your pretty little prepaid Visa card, complete with your chosen name on it. Won't people think oddly of you that you're carrying a card with somebody else's name on it? Possibly. But I like to think that it adds a little mystery. Just don't go using it at the grocery store. The lady behind the register might just call the cops if you're trying to use the card, she asks for the ID, and discovers that [oops] you're not Albert Richardson. So keep the card in your wallet and use it online or in places where they don't look at the card.

An account at an Offer site
Okay, we've got our Visa card, we've got our email accounts, and we're ready to get this damned show on the road. Looking over the reward sites out there, one of the best is OnlineRewardCenter - it's probably sketchy as all hell, but it does allow us to complete all the offers ourselves.

5. Fire up your webbrowser and go to this link to sign up for OnlineRewardCenter. IMPORTANT DETAILS: Firefox guys, you're going to probably need to use Internet Explorer or Safari. You really can use anything you want, but you'll need to disable all pop-up blockers, all javascript blockers, ad-blockers, etc. Yes, I agree this part sucks.

So follow that link, put in your zip code, and on to the next page. Fill out all the contact info on this page, using YOUR REAL NAME and address. The reasons for this are two-fold: 1) providing false information to the gift company more than likely would violate their terms of service and give them an easy justification of cancelling your order and 2) when your gift ships (usually UPS or FedEx) you'll probably have to show ID and sign to accept a package. So make sure you register under your REAL NAME. Do this however with the SECONDARY EMAIL ADDRESS we made in step #1. Nobody said the email address had to be your primary address. We do this because that email address is probably going to get a metric shit-ton of spam, and nobody needs that cluttering up their primary email account.

Now you'll get to living hell: the survey pages. What do I suggest you do? Close that web browser window. You're not going to be signing up for any of those (they don't count towards your offer!). Instead, do the following. Point your browser to http://www.onlinerewardcenter.com and click on "Redeem your Prize". Input your email address [the one you signed up under] and it should bring you to a status page, telling you how many offers you need to complete to get your prize. For an iPod this should be between 4-10, for something larger, more.

Time to get started.

For most of these sites, the orders are broken up into a certain number of pages, each with a required number of offers. Example: some sites require 6 offers in total to be completed, 2 from the first presented page of offers, 2 from the second, and 2 from the third. Usually offers on the first pages are the "easy" offers, things that are free/quick like ISP trials, online services, etc. The last page is usually the "hard" offers, the things that will require a nasty financial contribution like credit cards and the like. We'll get around to this later.

Before we decide which offer we want to connect, check out Rate The Offers.com - a website created that lets users rate the offers that sites like this make available. RTO breaks down each offer based on average cost to user, time to credit, and a couple other things. So we'll pick the good ones. We go back to the offer site and select an offer. Sign up using the details of the name/address/information that our credit card is under, and using the same secondary email address from step #1. One extremely important thing is to ALWAYS ALWAYS look for the cancellation 1-800 number or cancellation URL. You MUST know how to cancel these services, if you want your money back. I suggest that immediately after doing one of these deals that you email your normal, primary email account with the Name/Account #/Transaction # (if you have one)/email/date and time account was created/login/password/security phrase/anything else pertinent related to the account. If they send your secondary account a confirmation email, forward it to your primary and stick that in some folder with all the other free-stuff emails/info/notes.

7. Complete offers.

This is by far the crappiest step of them all. You have to sit there and pick your offers, complete them, and wait for credit. To complete an offer, click on it [remember to have any pop-up blocking features/software disabled], follow the instructions EXACTLY, and be forwarded to the offer's website. We sign up using our Visa card's name/address, we complete all forms (be wary, don't ever sign up for extra stuff, like "free gifts" - nothing's free) and we remember to email ourselves with all the information, including the date/time that the transaction went down.

8. Check the site for credit. You're going to want to log back into the original site to see if you've gotten credit for your completed offer. If you have, great. Time to move on to the next step. If not, wait. It can take up to 2 weeks. If you have waited 2 weeks and still no credit, send an email stating the problem, and move onto the next step.

9. Cancelling your offers and getting your money back. This step also sucks. So assuming you've been credited for the offer and you HAVE NOT USED ANY OF THE SERVICES from the offer (which means if you signed up for AOL you never logged in, if you signed up for iTunes you didn't log in, if you signed up to Earthlink you didn't log in, etc) then you probably can get most if not all of your money back. Simply pick up your phone and dial the 1-800 number that you recorded earlier to cancel the service. Listen carefully to any automated menus, or if you're impatient, hit 0 or # a whole shitload of times until the system craps out and dumps you to a real person. From there, tell them you want to cancel. Here's the crappy part - most services (especially AOL) will give you a lot of grief about cancelling. They want your dough. Don't give in! Tell them no, cut them off if they aren't listening - in all, be firm - not a jackass - and hold your ground. You're cancelling and there's nothing they can do to stop you. ALWAYS record a transaction or cancellation number - if they don't give you one, ask for one. Also, ask for the agent's name/extension/ID number. This ensures that in the event of any possible disputes that you'll be able to get answers more readily. Keep this information (transaction/cancellation #, time/date of cancellation, agent's info) in the same primary email account as before. Just keeping things straight.

So when you've completed enough of the offers, you should see the status change to "Print Prize Voucher" on the rewards site. I printed mine, mailed it, and within a couple of weeks got my iPod nano. For OnlineRewardCenter, their HQ is located in Florida, not too far from me, so that's why I guess I got my prize so fast.

Big key: as long as you don't give fake info to the gift company or otherwise try to screw them (hacking, etc) they're not going to mess with you. They don't care if you're giving the pre-paid Visa to these companies, as the gift company gets paid just the same. They make money and you get a prize. It's a good thing. Just make sure you're vigilant in your cancellations (and checking the site for your reward status) and that you're organized and have all of your information in one, reliable place.

Oh, and stay away from the credit card offers. Just a tip.

[And I'm still not responsible for you losing money. If you're scared you might, then don't try any of this. I'm not to blame for your stupidity. In fact, I'll probably just mock you for it.]