The ultimate get-rich-quick scheme

Since my email address is reasonably easily accessible on the Internet (I make no specific attempts to hide it), I get a fairly decent amount of spam. As an experiment, I thought I’d keep track of all the money I’m offered, just to see how rich I could be if only I bothered to respond to all the generous people who contact me.

In the 31 days of December 2009, I was offered a grand total of £105,668,800. £3.4 million per day, £142,000 per hour, or £395 per second. Not bad.

This sum includes $5 million that Michael Jackson apparently left me in his will, for being a special fan. Now, since I only bought one of his albums way back in 1989, I wouldn’t have thought I’d have made it onto Michael’s fan radar, but clearly this was one extremely generous man.

There are several implications to this. First, exactly how much money did Mr Jackson give away in his will? Even if we take Wikipedia’s conservative estimate of 65 million copies of Thriller sold, at $5 million per purchase, that’s $325 trillion straight away. And that’s just one album. No wonder there’s been a financial crisis – Michael Jackson had all the money in the world, plus a whole lot more that he wasn’t telling anyone about.

Second, someone must be doing some serious detective work. Just like several people I know, I wasn’t buying albums online in 1989. Tracking down the origin of a cash purchase to me (I was only 12, and credit card companies weren’t as generous then as they have been of late), tracing the various changes of address I’ve been through since then (eight, by my reckoning), and linking it all to my email address to let me know of this wonderful gift is a phenomenal achievement. The networks of collected information must be enormous. Big brother may well be watching us, but it’s OK – he’s only doing it so he can give us all lots of money.

The upshot of all this is that my money worries seem to be over. Except for where to keep it all. I’m not sure there’s a bank that I can trust at the moment, and if I want to keep it under my mattress, I’m going to have to raise the bedroom ceiling and buy a ladder.

January 1, 2010 Posted in: Ramblings