When I was a zit-covered tween in the early 1990’s I discovered music. More importantly I discovered music CLUBS. To remind everyone what those are, those were groups that you got CDs (the 1990‘s equivalent to iTunes or whatever. I’m not too sure how kids listen to music nowadays since I’m an old codger with hairy knuckles and an ever growing bald spot) for a really low price, providing that you purchased 5 more at the regularly extortionistic price. I think the best deal was like, 12 for a penny.
These clubs always had their “Membership Applications” as loose cards in the middles of magazines. Along with perfume & cologne sample strips. You filled them out and dropped them in the mail box. That was it. The postage was pre-paid.
The trick though was to not buy the extra CDs. Or at least ONLY buy those. You see, they also would send you random CDs that were “Geared to your taste”… which is odd because I always got Bobby Brown and Ace of Base disks, even though I ordered Aerosmith and Tom Petty and Lemonheads…. So I’m pretty sure that their music-similarity algorithm was fucked, to say the least. If you didn’t send back the randomly issued disks then they’d assume you wanted them and just charge you for them.
And if you did send them back? They’d never get there.
Yeah, it was a scam. So I felt that it was my duty to scam the scammers with a scam of my own.
I started ordering CDs under assumed names. Mainly super heros’ secret identities. I was “Scott Summers” (Cyclops), “Bruce Banner” (The Hulk), “Benjamin Jacob Grimm” (The Thing) and even “Hal Jordan” (Green Lantern). My Disk Connection was Marvelous (See what I did there? no? fine….). I kept getting tons of CDs every month, and then I’d never pay for them! I was really into it, and then I decided to try out totally made-up names.
We started to get packages for “Seymore Butts”, “Connie Lingus” and my favorite: “Harold J. Cox”. I can’t believe that this worked for so long, with so many different names going to the same address. I guess since this was before the current modern age of computers that red-flagging an application was more difficult. They probably used trailer-park high school dropouts to process the cards for $3.15/hr and at that point, why would they care if the company gets raped by a 12 year old?
It all came crashing down one day when my mom calls me down to answer the phone. The girl at the end asks for “Hugh G. Rection” and I hang up the phone. You see this was the 3rd time my mom got an apparent prank phone call (this was before caller ID and star-69 so prank calling was a pretty common occurrence) asking for “Harry Dicks” or “Dick Buttsman” or “Amanda Hugenkiss”.
For some reason that I cannot fathom she knew I was involved. And knew it was bad. Having me answer that call was her way of saying “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know you’re up to something. Do NOT make me find out.” So I stopped sending in those cards and eventually the clubs stopped sending me collections notices so I figured that was that.
I figured right. I win.
