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The Rant

Chain Letters

There's one tiny little problem with Usenet.

In theory, it's a great idea. Lots and lots of electronic notice boards, called newsgroups, where you can post your most profound thoughts, discuss matters of great importance, or simply whitter on about nothing of very great consequence.

Of course, with several million people on "the net", a single bulletin board would get horribly congested very, very quickly. So, there are thousands of bulletin boards, each with a title that tells you something about the subject of the messages on that board. I won't actually name any of these boards here, because I consider that there's too great a chance that doing so would encourage some malignant moron to carry out precisely the kind of annoying activity I'm about to describe - and there are still some newsgroups that these merchants haven't heard about yet!

The problem is that various other posts turn up on these boards, and they have nothing to do with what the board is supposed to be about. Generally speaking, they fall into two categories:

Invitations to visit web sites that feature pictures of people sans clothing;
Chain letters.

Both of these types of post feature certain clues in the titles of the post. The former usually include those words that are traditionally spelt in the tabloid newspapers as a row of asterisks (1) and spelt out in full, but enclosed in quotation marks, in the broadsheets. The latter usually include dollar signs, or words such as "rich", "opportunity" or "quick." Curiously, they do not include the word "Spam", which is a pity, for they are nothing else.

What are these chain letters? Well, simply put, they comprise a long rambling description of how the reader can make vast sums of money for only a small "investment," followed by a list of five names. The reader is then supposed to send $1.00 (although in an Anglicised version this had been revised to an ambitious £5.00!) to each of the people on the list, then delete the first name on the list, add his or her name to the bottom, and post 200 (yes, that's right, two hundred!) copies to various newsgroups. The chain letter then suggests that, from those two hundred postings, fifteen people will join in the scheme, sending $1.00 to everyone on the list. There then follows a description of how the reader will make thousands of (dollars, pounds, ningies, or whatever unit of currency appeals)

Round	Number of copies posted	Number of people responding	Money received
1	200	15	$15.00
2	15 x 200 = 3,000	15 x 15 = 225	$225.00
3	225 x 200 = 45,000	225 x 15 = 3,375	$3,375.00
4	3,375 x 200 = 675,000	3375 x 15 = 50,625	$50,625.00
5	50,625 x 200 = 10,125,000	50625 x 15 = 759,375	$759,375.00

Looks impressive, doesn't it? Well over three quarters of a million local currency units for an investment of only five? It sounds too good to be true - and for a very good reason!

The first point - what the table above shows is an exponential growth (or a geometrical progression) in which the income in each round is found by multiplying the income in the previous round by a constant. Now, infinite geometrical progressions do not occur in nature. Don't believe me? Well, consider this. How many baby rabbits can a single female rabbit produce in one year? Assume half of the offspring are female. How many baby rabbits will her offspring produce next year? Do they even need to wait until next year?

Keep going long enough, and you have to answer one very important question - why isn't the Earth covered in an infinitely deep layer of rabbits?

The answer is that something intervenes to limit the growth. It could be disease, food shortage, foxes, or the local farmer's 12-bore, but something keeps the rabbit population in check. So, what limits the growth of these chain letters? Common sense, mostly, in that no-one in their right mind is going to fall for it!

The second point - these chain letters usually contain estimates of the number of newsgroups (about 25,000) and the number of people with internet access ( about 40,000,000). So going back to the table - on round 5 50,625 people are supposed to post, in total, over ten million copies of this letter. That works out at more than 400 copies for each of the 25,000 newsgroups! So, consider. Every time you see one of these chain letters, there are already five names on the list, which means that you saw the letter on round 5 - at least. So, if this scheme is working as claimed, there should be 400 copies of it on every newsgroup. Well, we get far too many of these chain letters, but luckily it's nothing like 400 per newsgroup!

The third point - I've already mentioned that by the time you see one of these chain letters, it's already reached round 5. So you have to collect your money on rounds 6 to 10! Let's see what that looks like:

Round	Total number of copies posted	Total number of people responding	Money received by you (allegedly)
6	759375 x 200 = 151,875,000	759375 x 15 = 11,390,625 (the population of a typical capital city)	$15.00
7	11,390,625 x 200 = 2,278,125,000	11,390,625 x 200 = 170,859,375 (Off-hand, I can only think of four countries with populations this large)	$225.00
8	170,859,375 x 200 = 34,171,875,000	170,859,375 x 200 = 2,562,890,625 (half the population of the world. Roughly.)	$3,375.00
9	2,562,890,625 x 200 = 512,578,000,000	2,562,890,625 x 15 = 38,443,359,375 (six times the population of the world)	$50,625.00
10	38,443,359,375 x 200 = 7,688,670,000,000 (that's three hundred million postings on every newsgroup!)	38,443,359,375 x 15 = 576,650,000,000 (a hundred times the population of the world. This is starting to get silly.)	$759,375.00

So - anyone reckon that they'll actually make money - let alone nearly a million whatevers - from this scheme? (If anyone does... well, funny you should mention that, because I'm trying to find a buyer for Tower Bridge - cash sales only!)

As the pests who post this sort of twaddle delight in saying - if you don't believe me, check the maths for yourself! Be warned, though - your calculator may not have enough noughts to cope.

Or as the first letter of the word in question followed by three asterisks to represent the remaining letters, or, if the publishers are really worried that their readership may be too thick to understand what the word in question is without sufficient clues to make it blindingly obvious, all the letters with the vowel(s) replaced by (an) asterisk(s). Back to main text

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