Taken from my bulletin board from friendster. Just thought ill spread it around.


Beware of SMS ac, Birthday Alarms and Other Explotative Business Scams
Message: Dear All,

I believe that many (including yours truly) received
several requests to join SMS ac, or Hi5 or Birthday
Alarm.com

This is an explotative business scam. Do beware.

Phishing, spam and spyware installation are
always on the Internet. Unfortunately, it's the
Caucasians who always come up with such
exploits to rip Asians off. (especially
Singaporeans, who are honest, upright and not
that business savvy minded).

So far, friendster is reliable and i trust this
business model, despite friendster having 'down'
times so far.

SMS.ac is mobile data servies company and is the
most interesting example of an explotative
business model I have ever seen

Number one - I've never seen a company that
focuses more on recruitment than on the business
model. In fact, I'd say that recruitment IS the
business model.

Number two - SMS.ac suposedly has 10 million
users. In actual fact, the bulk of the data is
duplicate users, same users with multiple
accounts and bogus data. SMS.ac makes the
most noise about the user base. The founder,
Michael Pousti claims to be a Computer Scientist,
yet dropped out of college
(http://www.dailyaztec.com/Archive/Spring-1999/05-
06/City/story03.html) apparently to pursue a career
in ripping off other college students using mail
fraud (http://www.usps.com/judicial/1990deci/err-
1.htm). If this guy isn't a sociopath, I don't know
who is. It's amazing more people don't questions
what the hell is really going on there.

Number three - SMS.ac ripps off users who opt
into 'clubs' (interest groups who correspond by
SMS text messaging) by sending bogus text
messages to thousands of users 24 hours a day,
seven days a week. Users are billed by their
carriers for the usage of SMS.ac services.