5 Crazy Web Scams That Fooled A Lot Of People

Techcult blog has an interesting post about the 5 scams that found fertile ground on the Internet. For instance, the story of how Tiger Telematics, the maker of Gizmondo handheld gaming device (left), lost $200 million in just 6 months:

The business history of Tiger Telematics (the makers of Gizmondo) makes Grand Theft Auto look like Barney Teaches Spelling. The “managing executives” of the company had over twenty-four years of jail time between them for frauds and physical violence, they bought an entire London “modeling” agency, have wrecked over a million dollars worth of sports cars and had the entire-extended-family-of-all launch parties featuring Dannii Minogue, Sting and Busta Rhymes (among others). All this spending was supported by the sales of shares, presumably to people who signed the cheques in crayon, because when a company is paying for parties with shares then that is not a company that plans to be around for long.

For 2005 the company effectively lost over a million dollars a day. You could light a hundred dollars on fire once a minute, every minute without eating or sleeping and still not achieve that level of loss - and I assure you that these guys found WAY funner things to do with the cash than that. It was a real life Brewster’s Millions. In what amazingly hasn’t turned out to be an April Fool’s joke, one of the original crew is now attempting to raise investment capital to relaunch the company (translation - there are a few types of champagne he hasn’t tried yet). Which just proves that there are people desperate to make money out of “those computer-game things” despite not even knowing how to Google somebody.

Link - Thanks Daniel!