Ok, I’ve just recently discovered StumbleUpon.  I know, I know, it’s been around for a while now.  Up until a couple weeks ago, I was just too busy to mess with anything new.  Now I find that if I don’t have anything better to do, I’ll just open up Firefox, hit stumble and away I go.  It really is countless hours of fun.  My only complaint is that I can’t use it with Opera, my browser of choice.  So far I’ve found a few really addicting games such as copter and virus as well as the best web tool ever-well, probably not but it’s still pretty cool though.  Check out the Xinu backlink/PageRank/social networking/ect. tool here.

You can also check out my favorite sites on Stumble at http://sam2k.stumbleupon.com/

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There has been unbelievable hype leading up to today in anticipation of some sort of new product release from Apple.  There is significant evidence pointing to new MacBook Pros being released today which have shown up in Best Buy’s inventory database but, the iPhone SDK is supposed to be released by the end of February which suggests a firmware update, and the 3G iPhone is coming out *sometime*.  Maybe we’ll get all 3 today.

Oh, btw, the Apple Store is down.

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Revolution Money Exchange is a new player in the online payment processing game. They look to be offering a competitive experience and are not charging fees when you send or receive money. In fact, the fees they do charge are all administrative for stuff like requesting a check and overdrawing your account and appear to be quite reasonable.  Also, their arbitration clause looks to be much more fair than most.

To establish themselves as players in the online payment processing war, they are offering a free $25 bonus to sign up and are offering $10 when you refer someone up to $500.  These offers will be expiring on February 29th, so take advantage of this while you can.

Revolution Money Exchange LLC is underwritten by First Bank & Trust, Brookings, South Dakota, which is FDIC insured.

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Introduction
We’ve all seen them. You can’t go to many websites around the world and not see a flashing banner advertisement informing you that you can get a free trip to the finals of American Idol or a free Macbook Air, or a Free iPhone, or…or…or…*. Did I mention the * ? Let’s try that again. * * *. Yeah, I think there’s some fine print that goes with those advertisements. Something about having to sit under a toadstool while wishing upon a star during a full moon that eclipses while eating a snickers bar and visualizing a Jolly Roger. Or something like that. In fact, there is so much fine print, they have to use a star everytime they think about thinking about thinking about actually interacting with a vict-er, client.

Now, if I tell you that you can actually use one of these sites to get an iPhone for $80 or less, its probably not going to be long before you turn around and leave, never to darken my doorstep again. Actually, scratch that.  You can darken my blog’s doorstep but, you probably shouldn’t darken my doorstep. If you too skeptical at this point to follow along, check the bottom of this post for a Paypal screenshot that was taken Thursday.

If you’re going to trust me (you shouldn’t trust random people on the web as they’re probably out to screw you, just go with me on this one for a minute), you’ll need a few things. First, keep in mind that this is a way to lower your net cost when purchasing your iPhone. You will still have to slap down the $400 or $500 at your local Apple or AT&T store to get the iPhone. This is just a way to recoup much of that money or get it in advance. Second, if you don’t already have one, get an email address. You can get a great free email address at gmail.com. Third, you will need a Paypal (paypal.com, type it into your browser yourself to prevent phishing) account and you need to add a bank account or credit card to verify your identiy. Fourth, you need to reside in the United States or Canada and have a major credit card. Finally, you need to know that this will not be instant gratification. It will take at least a week of your attention and will require either some social networking or some social engineering.

Let’s Do This
Now, what’s this all about? The site is Your Free iPhone. The following easy to use step-by-step process will ensure that you are sent either a free iPhone or $560 in cash that can be used to get an iPhone at a net cost of $80 or less.

1. Join the site by clicking this link and entering your email address at the bottom of the page then fill out the contact info on the subsequent page. Read the Terms of Service and disqualify yourself if you are not eligible in some way. Believe me, this site will find out if you have violated the ToS and you will have wasted whatever time and effort you have put into this.
2. Complete 1 ‘Level A’ or 2 ‘Level B’ offers. There are several free trial offers that are just great. They cost just a few dollars to have a success kit of some type mailed to your home and they provide great info about money making opportunities on the web. Examples of these include the QuickBooks Simple Start, Yahoo Success Center, and Chuck Mullaney Teaches Ebay offers.  There are also trials for staples like Blockbuster and Gamefly.  If you like what you get then you can keep using the services after the trial period expires. If you’re not satisfied, you may contact the merchant to discuss your membership. For more info on completing an offer, see the completing an offer section below.
3. You will need referrals. This is where social networking vs. social engineering comes in, which I’ll explain below. The minimum referral requirement is 8. If you refer 8 people who all complete an offer, Your Free iPhone will send you an iPhone. No shipping charges or anything. They will ship it to you straight from Apple. The problem with this is that they can only purchase a few iPhones each day from Apple (due to Apple’s purchasing limits) so the waiting list is about 3 weeks long after you’ve completed an offer and referred peoples. When you have completed the offer requirements, gotten your referrals, and placed your order, ask them to send you $400 via Paypal instead of the iPhone due to their backlog.  They’ll be happy to comply.  The most efficient approach is to refer 11 people to receive $560 in your Paypal account. This was the approach that I took and I have attached a screenshot of my receipt to the bottom this post.

Social Networking VS Social Engineering
What do I mean by social networking vs. social engineering? Social networking is the way to maximize your profit on this deal and even come out ahead after purchasing your iPhone. Social networking involves getting your friends to sign up using your referral link and complete an offer so that they can work on getting their own iPhone. Its that simple. Give your friends your referral link, they sign up and complete an offer and you’re one referral down. There’s a catch, right? Nope. They just have to use real information (just like you) and they have to sign up and complete their offer requirements from a different network with different IP address. So, what if you don’t have any friends who could do this or you don’t have enough? This is where social engineering, building a network from the ground up, comes in. This was the approach that I chose because it can be dificult to try and explain something like this to non-web savvy individuals. Social engineering involves finding people online through forums or referral trading websites and paying them to sign up using your referral link and complete the offer requirments. I paid 3 people $20 and 8 people $25 to complete offers for me. You’re going to receive your best results if you place an ad offering this on a forum that you have an established reputation at and offer payment through Paypal. With either approach, keep in mind that the first freebie site is the most difficult. After you’ve found friends or acquaintances that are willing to sign up under you and complete an offer once, you may be able to go back to the well over and over again. If you have trouble coming up with somewhere to post your ad, post a comment and I’ll try to give you some suggestions.

Completing an Offer
After you’ve signed up, you have to complete the offer requirements. The offers rely on cookies to report your completion back to Your Free iPhone. As such, you need to make sure that you use Internet Explorer on the lowest security setting to make sure that your browser doesn’t reject the cookie that you need. Before you start the offer, you should also clear both your cookies and your browser cache incase you have visited the offer website at some point in the past as this can cause problems. With these things in mind, pick an offer that interests you and read and understand the requirements. Then click through to the offer website and fill in all the required information validly and use the same email address that you used to sign up to Your Free iPhone. Then, make sure and use a real credit card as virtual credit card numbers will not work and will get your account on Your Free iPhone closed. If you’ve got any questions about this, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help you out.

How Can They Afford to Do This?
The question that your entire decision to try this out probably hinges on is, “How could they possibly afford to send me an iPhone or $580?” This is simple. They use affiliate programs that provide ads through their website. When you click on one of the ads and complete the requirements for it, they get paid by the affiliate program. They actually lose money when you claim a prize so they’re hoping that you get a referral or two and then quit. But, if you do complete all the requirements, they are more than glad to send you your prize because it further solidifies their reputation. The company that owns Your Free iPhone has shipped several million $ worth of cash and merchandise over the last couple years, including $560 to me.

How to get an iPhone for $80
Over a couple weeks, I used the social engineering method to pay people to be my referral. I spent $260 doing this. On Thursday, I received $580 from Your Free iPhone. This is a net profit of $320. I can now go to my local AT&T store or to Apple.com and pay $400 for an 8GB iPhone. $400 - $320 = $80. Now, if I’d done a little social networking instead of some social engineering I could have decreased this $80 to $0 or even made money off the process.A screenshot of my Paypal receipt is attached below. If you have any questions about anything in this posts or need more info, please leave a comment.

Sites I’m working on now: 

YouriPodTouch4Free
360Elite4Free 

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It is just under 22 hours since I installed Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1 x64 on my laptop and I’ve just received my first Blue Screen of Death.  How I’ve missed ya buddy it’s been almost a week now since I’ve seen you.

Interestingly enough, I don’t believe I ever had a BSoD on one of my personal XP machines.

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I’m sure that more experienced bloggers would tell me to handle myself with a little more dignity and class, but I can’t help it this is just crazy!

Sam2k.com is being linked to from the GREATEST TECH BLOG ON THE INTERNET - Engadget! ( Check it out!) I submitted a tip to them about Vista SP1 x64 being available for download and included a link back to my post on the subject. So now they’re using my screen snip and linking to my blog! Now, that post is being syndicated through rss feeds and even ended up on ZDNet! You really can’t imagine this feeling until you’ve felt it. Its awesome!

I’m still not getting any love from Digg, but I’ll survive. An hour in and already 400 unique visitors. Man that’s going to ruin my averages.

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Service Pack 1 for Vista Ultimate x64 is showing up on my windows update.  I’ll be installing it in the next few minutes to see if there are any drastic improvements.  On the whole, I’ve not found Vista to be incredibly buggy, but Windows Media Center has been an incredible pain with all its frequent crashes and blackouts.

UPDATE: I did get SP1 installed this morning. The install process took just under an hour and went off without a hitch except for the cursor being a little shaky when I tried to do the required restart. This however was not an issue once everything was back up and running. I’m not really sure if anything is different yet. Things could be running just a little bit more smoothly on the whole, but I can’t really say for sure at this point. Everything I use frequently still appears to be functioning so at least there aren’t any major headaches on that front.

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As you may have read previously, I’ve been working on freebie sites for about a month now.  Friday evening I finally got all the referrals for the first one I’ve been working on: YourFreeiPhone.com. Since then, I’ve been waiting on the approval process to finalize.  I had read on other sites that approval always takes 4 days so I  wasn’t too worried about the wait, but I was a little bit nervous due to the fact that one of my referrals had been banned a few hours after I submitted for approval causing me to have to find someone else.  Anyway, now I just have to wait for them to send me the moola (Paypal).  They pay out on Wednesday and Saturday, so hopefully I submitted my payment request in time for it to be processed and paid tomorrow.  Once that happens, I’ll post details about the process I used to Get A Free iPhone!

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I would venture that most Paypal users have never had a problem with the world’s largest online payment processor yet hell fire and brimstone seem to be flowing about its name on the plethora of hate sites out there. I’ve been using Paypal for just under 5 years now and had never had a problem until this past Saturday.

As you may have read on Sam2k previously, over the last month or so I have been working on those pesky “freebie” sites that promise the greatest and bestest gadgets in exchange for completing some kind of advertised offer and getting a certain number of other people to do the same. The approach that I have been using involves the payment of others to sign up using my referral link and complete an offer. This approach has been marvelously successful and I was able to apply for review of my account on one of the sites Friday evening. Soon after submitting, one of my referrals was banned for violating the sites ToS. Since I had paid this person specifically to provide credit to my account, I sent him an email requesting that he return the monies I had paid him. I didn’t really want to drag the affair out, so when he offered me $19 (less than what I had paid him) in recompense, I accecpted.

From there, it all went downhill. Apparently, as soon as he sent the $19 to my Paypal account, he closed his own account. This caused Paypal’s system to throw a fraudulent activity flag and place a temporary hold on the payment I had received. When I received the email notifying me of this hold, I had not yet learned that this scammer had closed his account. So, being very confused, I called Paypal to find out what the problem was. I spoke to a moderately helpful Jim in Resolutions who was nice but unable to provide me with much information. He told me that I should contact the other party and request that he call Paypal. I did this but my friendly neighborhood scammer declined. So, I called back this afternoon and spoke with Rick in Resolutions for about 5 minutes. Rick told me that for the $19 it wasn’t worth either of our time and effort so he would just resolve the dispute for me and told me that if upon further review the payment is still diputed that I can call back and request a courtesy credit to cover it. This was an excellent response that perfectly addressed both my problem and the economics of the situation. I applaud Rick’s handling of the matter and respect the fact that Paypal gives its specialists the power to resolve problems without dragging things out. This may actually be the quickest dispute resolution I’ve ever been a part of. All told, the matter was resolved in less than 48 hours and only a few of them traditional business hours.

With customer service like this, I don’t understand why Paypal has so many haters. Sure, it was an inconvenience to me but there was no harm and it only took about an hour of my time. The lesson to be learned here is that reasonable people receive reasonable treatment from companies that they have dealings with, even Paypal. If you ever find yourself in a dispute, stay calm, reasonable, and talk it out.

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I know I am!

You can take the FCC’s quiz on their horribly designed website at dtv.gov.  Seriously, I could design a better
website than that, and I suck at designing!

There are 13 questions, which is a really strange number for a quiz, about the DTV transition.  They are
all pretty easy so give it a shot so that all your pals can know just how cool you are.

Or, if you just want to look cool, you can download your deputy certificate here. Honestly, who else is going to know?

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