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EdenicFaithful  Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw  2yr ago (text post)   4216 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 23, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Give me your best wild scam ideas.

Inspiration: My very elderly grandmother with pretty bad dementia got a wedding invitation from a very distant relation of her second husband. We had no idea who they were, not even vaguely, and she obviously didn't remember because there are days she doesn't remember my brother-in-law. My grandmother decided to send a check for $50 because that's what you do when you're invited to a wedding. My mother ultimately did figure out who they were, but in the meantime I thought to myself: this is a gold mine!

Send wedding invitations with fake first names (no last names) and pictures of nice young white couples to random nursing home residents. Don't send the same one to more than one resident at the same nursing home, mix it up, but there are 15,000 nursing homes with almost two million beds in the USA so you've got options. Not to mention active living retirement homes you could send to! Always set the wedding at a destination that is far and inconvenient, to prevent anyone from RSVPing yes, but most old people won't travel anyway. Old people with memory loss will be quite likely to say "Well, I don't remember them, but what if I do know them and then I stiff them and they're offended? I should just send them $50 to make sure I'm not rude. Didn't my dead friend/business partner/cousin/whatever have a daughter named something like that? Maybe it's her! I should just send $50."

If you got $20 out of 1/15 of the nursing homes in the country five times a year, you'd be hitting six figures.

Prostitution masqueraded as amateur porn studio. Sex with clients is filmed, no face is shown, and the video sold at high cost on some website. Client pays money to studio to provide the filming and space, but has ownership over video. The result is just prostitution, but completely legal, and sufficiently anonymous. You wouldn’t be able to regulate this without regulating the entire amateur porn industry.

Marc Randazza does a bunch of first amendment lawyering, including for porn companies, and says this is a dumb scheme that would fail really fast.

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