8 ms·

Money for Nothing

202 points by simonsquiff 13y ago

reverend_gonzo 13y ago
I did something similar in the early 2000s. I sold public-domain books (as in created by government agencies) as pdf on cd on eBay. The cost varied between $1-$10 with $5 shipping, and would cost me $1.20 out the door. I had everything automated with a robotic disc publisher/printer and stamp printer that I would work maybe one hour a week and bring in a couple hundred dollars each week. It was definitely a great source of side income. The main market was people who didn't search google, since they could take the title of the auction, put it in google, and usually find the PDF right there. There's still people doing the same out there but now the market's flooded and there's much less profit margin available.
- gamerdonkey 13y ago
  Depending on the size of the dataset, you may have been providing a valuable service to those on dialup (however unwittingly). I remember how even a download of 50-100MB would take dedication to keep everyone off the phone for hours and pray that there were no interruptions upstream. Paying $10-15 for a guaranteed CD of what I wanted would have been well within reason.
tool 13y ago
"One explanation for this could be money laundering." Reminds me of something a few months or so back (in 4chan/g/) when Samsung had some sort of a campaign that gave it's users free android market credits. I don't remember how you had to authenticate yourself, but it was easy to fabricate and people did it multiple times over. As a result, people made really bare android apps to buy from themselves to turn that credit into real money.
- RankingMember 13y ago
  "If you build it, he will [find a way to launder money with it]."
- cooper12 13y ago
  You authenticated by entering the serial number of the Galaxy Note 2. Many people obtained them en masse from youtube users unboxing the phone who didn't bother covering it. Others, I think, just brute forced the serials to enter. Not sure if that worked. I;m interested if google caught them or not. Surely they'd notice a spike in expensive app purchases using gift cards (if they measure things like that).
unicornporn 13y ago
Robot book publishing is really interesting. I think it peaked sometime around 2010-2011 when a lot of "robot books" were available on Amazon. Read more: http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/ http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-p...
- mjn 13y ago
  Wikipedia had to go through a push around that time to excise any references to such books from Wikipedia itself, because some had crept in, mostly by unsuspecting users who believed they had found an actual third-party book on an obscure subject, and didn't notice it was suspiciously similar to the Wikipedia article. It defeats the purpose of citing sources, of course, if Wikipedia "bootstraps" its own sources by citing print-outs of previous versions of Wikipedia articles as the source. This does leave a more subtle problem than literal printouts of Wikipedia articles, which is harder to solve. Sometimes journalists and even scholars consult a Wikipedia article for background, and then just repeat something similar uncritically, without independently verifying whether the Wikipedia article is correct. If the Wikipedia article then at some point ends up citing that writing as a source, a hidden reference-loop is created, with Wikipedia effectively "laundering" a self-reference (unintentionally) through a third party repeating something they read on Wikipedia. (Not a phenomenon unique to Wikipedia admittedly.)
  - JetSpiegel 13y ago
    Ironically, that is the thesis presented in http://xkcd.com/978/ http://xkcd.com/978/
mortov 13y ago
I think the issue here is this part : "One explanation for this could be money laundering" Selling some useless crap for stupid prices is one of the easiest laundering techniques beloved of many people trying to account for a sudden influx of wealth. Oh ? The suitcase of cash, well it's like this, I sold some old jeans, my wrecked chevvy and a busted tennis raquet to some nameless guy down the [pub|bowling alley|policemans annual ball] and he gave me like $250,000 in this suitcase for them. I'm sure some of these apps are people having a laugh and then getting an even bigger laugh when someone actually pays the stupid price tag they put on. However, at least some of this has a distinct whiff of laundry detergent and it's always useful to have some schmucks innocently purchasing thrown in for good measure to delay investigators as they follow dead ends to people with more money than sense.
- corresation 13y ago
  "Selling some useless crap for stupid prices is one of the easiest laundering techniques" If the goal is to do something completely and utterly ineffective, sure. If you were under suspicion and justified an influx of cash through specious claims, the money would be confiscated as proceeds of crime and you'd be on the hook to prove otherwise. People can argue whether that's fair or not, but the whole reason real money laundering exists is to integrate shady money into legitimate trades and enterprise, and this is a very complex, very involved endeavor: You can't simply manufacture a ridiculous explanation and call it a day, or you might as well simply hand it over when they come calling and put your hands out.
  - mortov 13y ago
    Even though most proceeds of crime legislation uses balance of probablity as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the practice is generally for you to be able to show some explanation where it come from which is non-criminal in order to keep the cash. Immoral (such as selling crap to people paying stupid prices for something which is worthless) is not enough to have the cash taken off you. There are lots of stories of people being duped but no actual law being broken; you pay me $50,000 for my burned out chevvy, that's your problem. I have a way to explain $50,000 out of thin air. Any junk yard will sell me a wrecked car for $100 and it's just a profitable business transaction for me to sell it on. Plus, you don't care because I gave you $55,000 15 minutes before the "transaction" so you made a profit when you handed me back $50,000! In practice to get to a confiscation hearing, there is an investigation which means following the transaction trail and the more complex and convoluted that is made with dead ends and people who disappear (but leave a small trail of evidence they were around at some point to prove they are real), the more time and money authorities expend and the longer it goes on with me hanging onto the money (even if you seized some of it already). The fact I'm selling crap and the transactions make it look like I'm mining gold in a moron mine is enough for a good lawyer to talk me out a seizure or have some bargain made with the prosecutor (which I can always delay paying anyway if I'm in Scotland it seems : http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/crime/revealed-75m-dirty-money-still-2976478 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/crime/revealed-75m-dirty-m.... I'm sure other places have similar stories.) How legislation is supposed to work (as portrayed in TV/Film Justice) and how it actually works in real life is very different. If it worked TV Style, every 419 scamming prince would be in cuffs when he went to the Western Union office to collect his processing fees. Instead they drive around Lagos in BMWs laughing at all the mugus they scammed with lame-ass stories.
andrewingram 13y ago
When I was building the search for a big ecommerce books site (approximately 20 million products), it was a nightmare trying to filter the print-on-demand products. At the time they were creating new "publishers" on an almost weekly-basis, we were constantly having to tweak our blacklists. The big problem was caused by the titles of all these books being stuffed full of keywords, so for almost any conceivable search they would show up quite prominently. There were some technological solutions we implemented, but it was a major annoyance all the same.
jonnathanson 13y ago
Money laundering seems like an interesting explanation, but there are far better and less risky ways to launder money. Cash businesses, or even bitcoin are superior to "selling" an app that could be taken down at any time, that requires credit cards on file to purchase, and whose transactions Apple or a credit card company could freeze, reverse, or cancel at will. It would be fairly trivial for Apple, in cooperation with a law enforcement agency, to source the transactions, map the patterns, and triangulate to likely points of origin. And it would probably arouse a lot of suspicion if an app of such obviously bullshit quality suddenly started raking in millions of dollars in sales -- thereby making sales of the app inefficient and risky as a laundry-integration method. I suppose the whole thing relies on iTunes gift cards and credits, rather than credit cards, but why overcomplicate things beyond there? Buying and reselling gift cards at a moderate discount would launder your money just fine, while limiting your exposure to third-party risk. Apropos of nothing, the dissection of the high-priced crapware reminded me of "I Am Rich," the infamous and short-lived iOS app from 2008. It cost $999.99, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a tagline on your screen. Evidently, at least eight to ten people bought a copy before Apple swung the ban hammer.
- CaptainZapp 13y ago
  Apropos of nothing, the dissection of the high-priced crapware reminded me of "I Am Rich," the infamous and short-lived iOS app from 2008. It cost $999.99, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a tagline on your screen. Evidently, at least eight to ten people bought a copy before Apple swung the ban hammer. I never understood why Apple banned that application. There was no fraud involved. The application did exactly what the description said it does (show a glowing red gem for 999.99) and it didn't violate any of the (quite arbitrary at that time) Apple app store policies, or requirements. If you want to put your douchiness on display by paying so much cash for no other reason than to yell out to the world that you can afford to throw 1000$ out of the window it shouldn't be up to Apple to put a stop to it. I assume it was a matter of fear about bad publicity on Apple's side. Nevertheless I thought pulling this app was one of their more innane decisions. Wikipedia has a brief entry on that app: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
corresation 13y ago
The money laundering hypothesis appears a lot, however I'm not sure I buy it -- the complexity and cost of getting many people involved, with many accounts and payment methods (themselves all tracked), all to then pay 30% to Apple on top, seems like a very convoluted and inefficient method. Worse, the goal of money laundering is to do it as subtly and legitimate-looking as possible, and putting garbage apps at ridiculous prices doesn't seem to meet that requirement. It seems more likely that someone was trying to game the charts: Some categories need surprisingly little revenue to top, and each of these apps started at ridiculous prices, dropping to the normal $0.99 a month later. Some very naive person may have thought "investing" in buying only a few copies of their app (getting back 70% of it, or even more if they bought discounted iTunes cards) would get them enough exposure that it would pay back (whether through future purchases of the app, or as some sort of backstop to demonstrate their excellence as an iOS developer, etc). This is, it's worth noting, exactly how many books get on best seller charts, particularly in the smaller-market, easily manipulated categories. ^1 Just as a point of reference, I implemented anti-money laundering systems for a banking conglomerate, so I have been deeply involved in analyzing money laundering schemes. I should add that I would love to make money for "nothing". To make the next Flappy Bird. Don't we all? To be very negative about that has the unpleasant stench of jealousy. ^1 - http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732386430...
- lucaspiller 13y ago
  > It seems more likely that someone was trying to game the charts: Some categories need surprisingly little revenue to top, and each of these apps started at ridiculous prices, dropping to the normal $0.99 a month later. Hang on... so the top paid apps are based on revenue? I always assumed it was based on the number of downloads.
  - corresation 13y ago
    There is a top paid, and a top grossing, overall and by category, on both iTunes and the Play Store. I don't know what the metric for "top paid" is (though comparing downloads/ratings and price/IAP, it, too, seems to be by gross and not counts, or some combination of the two), but top grossing would very much benefit from this scheme.
eli 13y ago
I would assume it's purchased from stolen Apple IDs and/or credit cards. That seems a whole lot more straightforward and likely than someone handing out dirty money to a bunch of people with legit Apple accounts.
- mittermayr 13y ago
  this sounds like a plausible approach, although I wonder for how long such a run would work given that very soon, the seller account would be shutdown if 99% of purchases were made by credit cards reported stolen or accruing reverse charges quickly. I could see that work briefly, but the seller account would long be gone now, after a single run even, I'd assume. unless, this is just nothing large at play, just a random dude stealing cards here and there, less than 100k a year type of criminal activity.
  - eli 13y ago
    Maybe they aren't credit cards, but stolen iTunes gift cards (or legit gift cards purchased with stolen credit cards). I don't think it would work very well for a long time at a large volume. But so what? Set up a new seller account and start over.
    - nhangen 13y ago
      Or legit gift cards purchased with cash
llimllib 13y ago
I actually used to write book arbitrage software, and this person has managed to completely misunderstand it. I'm not arguing here for its societal value, just that dan appears to have misunderstood some fundamental bits about how it works. > Robot 1 offers Book A for $10. It probably doesn't have it in stock, but it knows where it can buy it for, say, $9, drop-ship it to the customer without ever seeing the acutal product, and make a buck on the arbitrage. Robot 2 notices this and lists the same book for $11, hoping to do the same thing. Robot 1 notices Robot 2's listing, doesn't know or care that Robot 2 is another arbitrage trader, and reprices its listing for the book to $12. Robot 2 notices this and goes to $13, and away we go. This makes no sense; the fundamental rule of amazon bots is that consumers buying used books almost always buy the lowest-priced used book available. So the bot war would send the price down, not up. Why in the world would bot 2 offer the book for $11? It would know that nobody would buy it when there was one already listed for $10. The silly-high-priced books that I saw when I was working for the book company were rare long-tail books. One of the discoveries that many people have made is that for rare books, whether or not you understand what the heck it is, some % of them will get bought even if they're listed for silly high prices. Enough people will pay thousands of dollars (not an exaggeration) for a used copy of a book that they can't find elsewhere that stocking the long tail of books can in fact be very valuable. That means that, when you find lots of rare books, your incentive is to throw out some crazy-high price for each, because some % of them will, in fact, get paid, making the whole enterprise worthwhile. edit: Arbitrage on the same market Does Not Work, in my experience, and to just claim that it does with no evidence doesn't make it any more likely to do so.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  Bot 2 sells higher because it needs to buy the book from Bot 1. It's either in the article on in the links inside.
  - nickff 13y ago
    Why does it need to buy the book at all?
    - 13y ago
mcguire 13y ago
"And, more importantly, you don't contribute to the wealth of people whose target market is 'the inattentive, ignorant, and preferably inebriated'." Hey, hey! Let's not get crazy. If everyone did that, the first-world economy would disintegrate.
maerF0x0 13y ago
Arbitrage adds market making value. Just like trading desks that make it so I dont have to (physically) find a person who has apple shares in order to buy some. By making a well (or better) run market, prices can converge to their true value. The seller of the shares can potentially sell to more buyers, therefore finding the highest price possible. The buyer can potentially buy from more sellers therefore finding the lowest price possible. Between the two we get the "most agreeable" pricing . This is why selling CDs of free things on ebay converged down to the price of a CD + Shipping . Similarly its why (at least for now) bitcoins ought to hang out around the cost of electricity + the capital cost of ASICs ... If the price is much lower, dont mine, if the price is much higher its cheaper to buy electricity and ASICs than to buy bitcoins.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  I'd hazard a guess that everyone here understands how arbitrage is supposed to work. But how valuable is market making, really? Is it always a good thing that "well-run" markets tend towards the extremes of having razor-thin producer excess or razor-thin consumer excess? Because that's what seems to happen in big/equilibrium markets. One party has a slightly stronger bargaining position and the process of market-making teases that out and translates it into "one person wins big, one person wins just-barely-more-than-nothing." In the process, some of that excess winds up in the hands of middlemen, so to argue that "it's a feature, not a bug" you have to show not only that the value of driving one party's margins to 0 is positive, but that it exceeds the sum of the value captured by middlemen in the process. Sometimes we can throw up our hands and say "eh, you win some you lose some," but other times the result is so unspeakably horrific that this attitude goes from "unproductive" to "evil." Example: labor markets. Is it a feature or a bug that unskilled laborers don't manage to capture any of their producer excess, and that the equilibrium wage would lie just north of what what was required to make work preferable to starvation and homelessness (less, actually, because some people will be willing to invest savings/debt/daddy's$$ in acquiring experience = differentiation = freedom from the crushing competition)? Look, I don't know of any system that I'm convinced is better. But that doesn't make the market perfect, so let's not pretend that its shit doesn't stink. In particular, is it possible to structure a market in some way to split the excess? Are there any big/equilibrium markets people know of that we could look to for inspiration?
sdegutis 13y ago
As someone who does not have a lot of money, this article's title intrigued me. However, I was disappointed to discover that the article did not actually provide ways to get money for nothing. Overall, I was overall not very satisfied with the experience of reading this article, mostly because it did not provide me with ways of obtaining money for nothing, even though the title suggested it would. I would not recommend the article to anybody who is seeking to find ways to obtain money for nothing, as the article does not contain such information, and it would be a disappointment for them as well.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- websitescenes 13y ago
  At least there is someone else here with a sense of humor! lol
  - sdegutis 13y ago
    My goal is to stay at exactly 800 karma. But I started going over a bit.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sdegutis 13y ago
  Who keeps upvoting this? You're totally not doing what I assumed you would.
  - Pitarou 13y ago
    That's the best "upvote whoring" I've seen all week. Gets a point from me! :-)
websitescenes 13y ago
and chicks for free.
- tempestn 13y ago
  Most of my childhood, I thought that line was "and checks for free". It made perfect sense!
  - websitescenes 13y ago
    OMG you may be right. Now I'm not sure.
    - websitescenes 13y ago
      Nope. I was right. Just looked.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  Ctrl + f Smile Hum
lurkinggrue 13y ago
Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it you code the app on the iPhone store. That ain't workin' that's the way you do it Money for nothin' and chicks for free
erichocean 13y ago
OT, but related: One way to eliminate the lower price competitors is to "buy" their stuff, but with a card that has no money/credit on it. It'll be 10 days before Amazon allows the item to re-listed. Had this happen to me three times in a row on the same item. Why do arbitrage when you can simply nuke any lower-priced competition at no cost? In my case, every other item for sale, regardless of seller, was at least $150 higher. (I eventually sold the item on Craigslist for cash.)

202 points by simonsquiff 13y ago

I did something similar in the early 2000s. I sold public-domain books (as in created by government agencies) as pdf on cd on eBay. The cost varied between $1-$10 with $5 shipping, and would cost me $1.20 out the door. I had everything automated with a robotic disc publisher/printer and stamp printer that I would work maybe one hour a week and bring in a couple hundred dollars each week. It was definitely a great source of side income. The main market was people who didn't search google, since they could take the title of the auction, put it in google, and usually find the PDF right there. There's still people doing the same out there but now the market's flooded and there's much less profit margin available.

gamerdonkey 13y ago
Depending on the size of the dataset, you may have been providing a valuable service to those on dialup (however unwittingly). I remember how even a download of 50-100MB would take dedication to keep everyone off the phone for hours and pray that there were no interruptions upstream. Paying $10-15 for a guaranteed CD of what I wanted would have been well within reason.

tool 13y ago

"One explanation for this could be money laundering." Reminds me of something a few months or so back (in 4chan/g/) when Samsung had some sort of a campaign that gave it's users free android market credits. I don't remember how you had to authenticate yourself, but it was easy to fabricate and people did it multiple times over. As a result, people made really bare android apps to buy from themselves to turn that credit into real money.

RankingMember 13y ago
"If you build it, he will [find a way to launder money with it]."
cooper12 13y ago
You authenticated by entering the serial number of the Galaxy Note 2. Many people obtained them en masse from youtube users unboxing the phone who didn't bother covering it. Others, I think, just brute forced the serials to enter. Not sure if that worked. I;m interested if google caught them or not. Surely they'd notice a spike in expensive app purchases using gift cards (if they measure things like that).

unicornporn 13y ago

Robot book publishing is really interesting. I think it peaked sometime around 2010-2011 when a lot of "robot books" were available on Amazon. Read more: http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/ http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-p...

mjn 13y ago
Wikipedia had to go through a push around that time to excise any references to such books from Wikipedia itself, because some had crept in, mostly by unsuspecting users who believed they had found an actual third-party book on an obscure subject, and didn't notice it was suspiciously similar to the Wikipedia article. It defeats the purpose of citing sources, of course, if Wikipedia "bootstraps" its own sources by citing print-outs of previous versions of Wikipedia articles as the source. This does leave a more subtle problem than literal printouts of Wikipedia articles, which is harder to solve. Sometimes journalists and even scholars consult a Wikipedia article for background, and then just repeat something similar uncritically, without independently verifying whether the Wikipedia article is correct. If the Wikipedia article then at some point ends up citing that writing as a source, a hidden reference-loop is created, with Wikipedia effectively "laundering" a self-reference (unintentionally) through a third party repeating something they read on Wikipedia. (Not a phenomenon unique to Wikipedia admittedly.)
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  Ironically, that is the thesis presented in http://xkcd.com/978/ http://xkcd.com/978/

mortov 13y ago

I think the issue here is this part : "One explanation for this could be money laundering" Selling some useless crap for stupid prices is one of the easiest laundering techniques beloved of many people trying to account for a sudden influx of wealth. Oh ? The suitcase of cash, well it's like this, I sold some old jeans, my wrecked chevvy and a busted tennis raquet to some nameless guy down the [pub|bowling alley|policemans annual ball] and he gave me like $250,000 in this suitcase for them. I'm sure some of these apps are people having a laugh and then getting an even bigger laugh when someone actually pays the stupid price tag they put on. However, at least some of this has a distinct whiff of laundry detergent and it's always useful to have some schmucks innocently purchasing thrown in for good measure to delay investigators as they follow dead ends to people with more money than sense.

corresation 13y ago
"Selling some useless crap for stupid prices is one of the easiest laundering techniques" If the goal is to do something completely and utterly ineffective, sure. If you were under suspicion and justified an influx of cash through specious claims, the money would be confiscated as proceeds of crime and you'd be on the hook to prove otherwise. People can argue whether that's fair or not, but the whole reason real money laundering exists is to integrate shady money into legitimate trades and enterprise, and this is a very complex, very involved endeavor: You can't simply manufacture a ridiculous explanation and call it a day, or you might as well simply hand it over when they come calling and put your hands out.
- mortov 13y ago
  Even though most proceeds of crime legislation uses balance of probablity as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the practice is generally for you to be able to show some explanation where it come from which is non-criminal in order to keep the cash. Immoral (such as selling crap to people paying stupid prices for something which is worthless) is not enough to have the cash taken off you. There are lots of stories of people being duped but no actual law being broken; you pay me $50,000 for my burned out chevvy, that's your problem. I have a way to explain $50,000 out of thin air. Any junk yard will sell me a wrecked car for $100 and it's just a profitable business transaction for me to sell it on. Plus, you don't care because I gave you $55,000 15 minutes before the "transaction" so you made a profit when you handed me back $50,000! In practice to get to a confiscation hearing, there is an investigation which means following the transaction trail and the more complex and convoluted that is made with dead ends and people who disappear (but leave a small trail of evidence they were around at some point to prove they are real), the more time and money authorities expend and the longer it goes on with me hanging onto the money (even if you seized some of it already). The fact I'm selling crap and the transactions make it look like I'm mining gold in a moron mine is enough for a good lawyer to talk me out a seizure or have some bargain made with the prosecutor (which I can always delay paying anyway if I'm in Scotland it seems : http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/crime/revealed-75m-dirty-money-still-2976478 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/crime/revealed-75m-dirty-m.... I'm sure other places have similar stories.) How legislation is supposed to work (as portrayed in TV/Film Justice) and how it actually works in real life is very different. If it worked TV Style, every 419 scamming prince would be in cuffs when he went to the Western Union office to collect his processing fees. Instead they drive around Lagos in BMWs laughing at all the mugus they scammed with lame-ass stories.

andrewingram 13y ago

When I was building the search for a big ecommerce books site (approximately 20 million products), it was a nightmare trying to filter the print-on-demand products. At the time they were creating new "publishers" on an almost weekly-basis, we were constantly having to tweak our blacklists. The big problem was caused by the titles of all these books being stuffed full of keywords, so for almost any conceivable search they would show up quite prominently. There were some technological solutions we implemented, but it was a major annoyance all the same.

jonnathanson 13y ago

Money laundering seems like an interesting explanation, but there are far better and less risky ways to launder money. Cash businesses, or even bitcoin are superior to "selling" an app that could be taken down at any time, that requires credit cards on file to purchase, and whose transactions Apple or a credit card company could freeze, reverse, or cancel at will. It would be fairly trivial for Apple, in cooperation with a law enforcement agency, to source the transactions, map the patterns, and triangulate to likely points of origin. And it would probably arouse a lot of suspicion if an app of such obviously bullshit quality suddenly started raking in millions of dollars in sales -- thereby making sales of the app inefficient and risky as a laundry-integration method. I suppose the whole thing relies on iTunes gift cards and credits, rather than credit cards, but why overcomplicate things beyond there? Buying and reselling gift cards at a moderate discount would launder your money just fine, while limiting your exposure to third-party risk. Apropos of nothing, the dissection of the high-priced crapware reminded me of "I Am Rich," the infamous and short-lived iOS app from 2008. It cost $999.99, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a tagline on your screen. Evidently, at least eight to ten people bought a copy before Apple swung the ban hammer.

CaptainZapp 13y ago
Apropos of nothing, the dissection of the high-priced crapware reminded me of "I Am Rich," the infamous and short-lived iOS app from 2008. It cost $999.99, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a tagline on your screen. Evidently, at least eight to ten people bought a copy before Apple swung the ban hammer. I never understood why Apple banned that application. There was no fraud involved. The application did exactly what the description said it does (show a glowing red gem for 999.99) and it didn't violate any of the (quite arbitrary at that time) Apple app store policies, or requirements. If you want to put your douchiness on display by paying so much cash for no other reason than to yell out to the world that you can afford to throw 1000$ out of the window it shouldn't be up to Apple to put a stop to it. I assume it was a matter of fear about bad publicity on Apple's side. Nevertheless I thought pulling this app was one of their more innane decisions. Wikipedia has a brief entry on that app: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

corresation 13y ago

The money laundering hypothesis appears a lot, however I'm not sure I buy it -- the complexity and cost of getting many people involved, with many accounts and payment methods (themselves all tracked), all to then pay 30% to Apple on top, seems like a very convoluted and inefficient method. Worse, the goal of money laundering is to do it as subtly and legitimate-looking as possible, and putting garbage apps at ridiculous prices doesn't seem to meet that requirement. It seems more likely that someone was trying to game the charts: Some categories need surprisingly little revenue to top, and each of these apps started at ridiculous prices, dropping to the normal $0.99 a month later. Some very naive person may have thought "investing" in buying only a few copies of their app (getting back 70% of it, or even more if they bought discounted iTunes cards) would get them enough exposure that it would pay back (whether through future purchases of the app, or as some sort of backstop to demonstrate their excellence as an iOS developer, etc). This is, it's worth noting, exactly how many books get on best seller charts, particularly in the smaller-market, easily manipulated categories. ^1 Just as a point of reference, I implemented anti-money laundering systems for a banking conglomerate, so I have been deeply involved in analyzing money laundering schemes. I should add that I would love to make money for "nothing". To make the next Flappy Bird. Don't we all? To be very negative about that has the unpleasant stench of jealousy. ^1 - http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732386430...

lucaspiller 13y ago
> It seems more likely that someone was trying to game the charts: Some categories need surprisingly little revenue to top, and each of these apps started at ridiculous prices, dropping to the normal $0.99 a month later. Hang on... so the top paid apps are based on revenue? I always assumed it was based on the number of downloads.
- corresation 13y ago
  There is a top paid, and a top grossing, overall and by category, on both iTunes and the Play Store. I don't know what the metric for "top paid" is (though comparing downloads/ratings and price/IAP, it, too, seems to be by gross and not counts, or some combination of the two), but top grossing would very much benefit from this scheme.

eli 13y ago

I would assume it's purchased from stolen Apple IDs and/or credit cards. That seems a whole lot more straightforward and likely than someone handing out dirty money to a bunch of people with legit Apple accounts.

mittermayr 13y ago
this sounds like a plausible approach, although I wonder for how long such a run would work given that very soon, the seller account would be shutdown if 99% of purchases were made by credit cards reported stolen or accruing reverse charges quickly. I could see that work briefly, but the seller account would long be gone now, after a single run even, I'd assume. unless, this is just nothing large at play, just a random dude stealing cards here and there, less than 100k a year type of criminal activity.
- eli 13y ago
  Maybe they aren't credit cards, but stolen iTunes gift cards (or legit gift cards purchased with stolen credit cards). I don't think it would work very well for a long time at a large volume. But so what? Set up a new seller account and start over.
  - nhangen 13y ago
    Or legit gift cards purchased with cash

llimllib 13y ago

I actually used to write book arbitrage software, and this person has managed to completely misunderstand it. I'm not arguing here for its societal value, just that dan appears to have misunderstood some fundamental bits about how it works. > Robot 1 offers Book A for $10. It probably doesn't have it in stock, but it knows where it can buy it for, say, $9, drop-ship it to the customer without ever seeing the acutal product, and make a buck on the arbitrage. Robot 2 notices this and lists the same book for $11, hoping to do the same thing. Robot 1 notices Robot 2's listing, doesn't know or care that Robot 2 is another arbitrage trader, and reprices its listing for the book to $12. Robot 2 notices this and goes to $13, and away we go. This makes no sense; the fundamental rule of amazon bots is that consumers buying used books almost always buy the lowest-priced used book available. So the bot war would send the price down, not up. Why in the world would bot 2 offer the book for $11? It would know that nobody would buy it when there was one already listed for $10. The silly-high-priced books that I saw when I was working for the book company were rare long-tail books. One of the discoveries that many people have made is that for rare books, whether or not you understand what the heck it is, some % of them will get bought even if they're listed for silly high prices. Enough people will pay thousands of dollars (not an exaggeration) for a used copy of a book that they can't find elsewhere that stocking the long tail of books can in fact be very valuable. That means that, when you find lots of rare books, your incentive is to throw out some crazy-high price for each, because some % of them will, in fact, get paid, making the whole enterprise worthwhile. edit: Arbitrage on the same market Does Not Work, in my experience, and to just claim that it does with no evidence doesn't make it any more likely to do so.

JetSpiegel 13y ago
Bot 2 sells higher because it needs to buy the book from Bot 1. It's either in the article on in the links inside.
- nickff 13y ago
  Why does it need to buy the book at all?
  - 13y ago

mcguire 13y ago

"And, more importantly, you don't contribute to the wealth of people whose target market is 'the inattentive, ignorant, and preferably inebriated'." Hey, hey! Let's not get crazy. If everyone did that, the first-world economy would disintegrate.

maerF0x0 13y ago

Arbitrage adds market making value. Just like trading desks that make it so I dont have to (physically) find a person who has apple shares in order to buy some. By making a well (or better) run market, prices can converge to their true value. The seller of the shares can potentially sell to more buyers, therefore finding the highest price possible. The buyer can potentially buy from more sellers therefore finding the lowest price possible. Between the two we get the "most agreeable" pricing . This is why selling CDs of free things on ebay converged down to the price of a CD + Shipping . Similarly its why (at least for now) bitcoins ought to hang out around the cost of electricity + the capital cost of ASICs ... If the price is much lower, dont mine, if the price is much higher its cheaper to buy electricity and ASICs than to buy bitcoins.

jjoonathan 13y ago
I'd hazard a guess that everyone here understands how arbitrage is supposed to work. But how valuable is market making, really? Is it always a good thing that "well-run" markets tend towards the extremes of having razor-thin producer excess or razor-thin consumer excess? Because that's what seems to happen in big/equilibrium markets. One party has a slightly stronger bargaining position and the process of market-making teases that out and translates it into "one person wins big, one person wins just-barely-more-than-nothing." In the process, some of that excess winds up in the hands of middlemen, so to argue that "it's a feature, not a bug" you have to show not only that the value of driving one party's margins to 0 is positive, but that it exceeds the sum of the value captured by middlemen in the process. Sometimes we can throw up our hands and say "eh, you win some you lose some," but other times the result is so unspeakably horrific that this attitude goes from "unproductive" to "evil." Example: labor markets. Is it a feature or a bug that unskilled laborers don't manage to capture any of their producer excess, and that the equilibrium wage would lie just north of what what was required to make work preferable to starvation and homelessness (less, actually, because some people will be willing to invest savings/debt/daddy's$$ in acquiring experience = differentiation = freedom from the crushing competition)? Look, I don't know of any system that I'm convinced is better. But that doesn't make the market perfect, so let's not pretend that its shit doesn't stink. In particular, is it possible to structure a market in some way to split the excess? Are there any big/equilibrium markets people know of that we could look to for inspiration?

sdegutis 13y ago

As someone who does not have a lot of money, this article's title intrigued me. However, I was disappointed to discover that the article did not actually provide ways to get money for nothing. Overall, I was overall not very satisfied with the experience of reading this article, mostly because it did not provide me with ways of obtaining money for nothing, even though the title suggested it would. I would not recommend the article to anybody who is seeking to find ways to obtain money for nothing, as the article does not contain such information, and it would be a disappointment for them as well.

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websitescenes 13y ago
At least there is someone else here with a sense of humor! lol
- sdegutis 13y ago
  My goal is to stay at exactly 800 karma. But I started going over a bit.
deleted 13y ago
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sdegutis 13y ago
Who keeps upvoting this? You're totally not doing what I assumed you would.
- Pitarou 13y ago
  That's the best "upvote whoring" I've seen all week. Gets a point from me! :-)

websitescenes 13y ago

and chicks for free.

tempestn 13y ago
Most of my childhood, I thought that line was "and checks for free". It made perfect sense!
- websitescenes 13y ago
  OMG you may be right. Now I'm not sure.
  - websitescenes 13y ago
    Nope. I was right. Just looked.
thatthatis 13y ago
Ctrl + f Smile Hum

lurkinggrue 13y ago

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it you code the app on the iPhone store. That ain't workin' that's the way you do it Money for nothin' and chicks for free

erichocean 13y ago

OT, but related: One way to eliminate the lower price competitors is to "buy" their stuff, but with a card that has no money/credit on it. It'll be 10 days before Amazon allows the item to re-listed. Had this happen to me three times in a row on the same item. Why do arbitrage when you can simply nuke any lower-priced competition at no cost? In my case, every other item for sale, regardless of seller, was at least $150 higher. (I eventually sold the item on Craigslist for cash.)