[tagtastic]

My family was moderately well off, and I have a total "saving money" addiction - so all the birthday money and Christmas money I got growing up I rarely ever spent, so I've always had a decent amount of cash.

My first serious money was made in high school, online advertising scams! [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

A couple friends and I setup a few legitimate web sites that were advertising driven and designed/hosted some websites for a few random companies. These were almost all break even or losing ventures.

I "expanded" the business by using our advertisers on password pages for a warez hotline server I ran. Basically forced people to click on the banners to get the password so they could download my warez/pron/music/etc. I also clicked on the banners a ton myself from various computers at school/etc. Unfortunately we got caught by our advertiser after a couple weeks of this. They cancelled our account - but they still paid us in full!

I set the system up again late senior year with a new advertiser. I dramatically accelerated the clicks after getting cable internet so I could upload the warez faster. Unfortunately the fully optimized system only ran for about a week, then Comcast called me and told me to stop. They scared me and that was my only option for broadband, so I didn't want to lose it. Same held true in college, if I lost my school internet connection I had no other choices - and I'd probably die w/o the internet [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

All told, I raked in about $5k from these scams, about half of it in the last 2-3 days.

Obviously this stuff was wrong/against terms of service/possibly illegal, but I never felt that bad about it. At this time (like 1996-2000), the online advertising industry was ridiculously profitable, I was filling dixie cups from the ocean. Bang, internet bubble bursts/stock market crash, now internet advertising is a very small fraction as profitable as it once was + the advertising agencies all have extensive fraud detection (because their margins are so much smaller), so something like this would be v difficult if not impossible to pull off now. Not to mention everyone can easily get warez/pron/music/movies free, fast and hassle free from torrent sites now.