Imagine earning £8,500 a day. For one day's work, you would earn roughly the national minimum wage for a year. Working three days would bring in the average annual salary. It's £2 million a year with holidays on a five day week, or in excess of £3 million if you work every day.
You would be up there with investment bankers, chief executives of big companies, premier league footballers, Hollywood A-listers – all occupations requiring extraordinary talent and almost superhuman endurance.
Now if I said I could show you how to earn an average £8,500 a day, with just a few hours' work and without qualifications, you would dismiss me as a fantasist, pointless dreamer and charlatan.
You don't need any special skills!
Yet this is what the card which popped through my front door this week – along with the pizza parlour flyers and plastic bags for dodgy charities – promised me. I could pull in more than £8,500 a day in my spare time, working from home. I would not need any special training or skills.
The card promised the secret of buying something for £50 and then selling it for £2,000 – a forty-fold gain. Doing this four or five times a day would hit my target.
The website address immediately diverted me to a video of a very ordinary man who told me his life story. He had been brought up in a single parent household in a one-room flat, with only an outside lavatory and no bathroom. His clothes were cast-offs from the Salvation Army. He left school having failed all of his exams, drifting into petty crime, and then low-paid, tedious employment.
But one day, he jumped on a plane to the United States. While there he happened to meet a multi-millionaire who gave him the key to unbelievable wealth, a veritable money machine which never stops paying out.
It's unclear why he suddenly went to the US and how he managed to meet the rich person. However, the result is clear. On his return, he copied the American's financial formula, and within weeks he was able to quit his mundane job, clear all his debts, buy a £1 million house for himself and another for his old mum (both with cash) and own five Ferraris.
[SPOTLIGHT]It is a classic rags-to-riches story, told with such sincerity. He has been doing it for so long now - somewhere between 17 and 25 years - that he has so far put more than £50 million into his bank account.
Would you sell this secret for £12.50?
So what is it that you can buy for £50 and then sell easily for £2,000? The website video does not say. You are, however, encouraged to buy a £12.50 book which promises to set you on the way to unimaginable riches.
This is the season of goodwill, so I don't want to be unduly sceptical. But I know that if I had something that cost me £50 and which I could then sell on many times a day for £2,000, I would not want to share that with anyone else, let alone for just £12.50 a time.
Of course that £12.50 is just for starters. To get near to the secret, you have to subscribe to a £50 per month course, a £120 a year magazine, and then attend several weekend training sessions at £2,000 a time. Once you start to shell out, you keep pouring away the cash, chasing your own financial holy grail. The theory is that you will find lots of willing takers among those who have nothing and are hungry for money.
The highly profitable product is the course itself, which tells you how to publicise courses. Their content is the usual get-rich-quick rhetoric.
It's an updated and more sophisticated version of the old newspaper classified advert scam. “Earn big money, working at home – no effort or qualifications needed. Send £10 to Box.” A few days later, an envelope would arrive in return for your tenner. Inside was a sheet of paper which said:
“To make a fortune, insert this advert “Earn big money, working at home etc ” into local newspapers.
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