We received a request to check out this website that is offering free shares to anyone who joins them for free.

Is this for real or is this a scam? Where do they earn their revenue?

We are curious, so we signed up for a free account using a spare email address and a common password.

When dealing with unknown sites like this, we still prefer to be careful, because some of them simply collects email address to be sold off as spam database. So always keep a spare email address to use in situations like this. You can always change the email address later.

The signing up process is a breeze, except that they keep asking for the "Recommender". We gave that a pass and came to the main page, showing a list of people who has already signed up. Are they real or fake - who cares.

Next, we found out that we are given 100 shares for joining, and the following message:

------

me2everyone Limited was incorporated in England in September 2008.  Run by an experienced team and advised by our Global Executive board, we aim to create one of the most visited websites on the planet by 2012. When the main website launches we wll add language support in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Italian. We will also add furthe languages upon request.

Any shares on this page will be paid for by us (or our partners) and so you can relax, knowing you never have to pay a single penny for your membership.  In 2009 we will open an in-world "trading room" where you can offer your shares for sale to other members.  Today they may be worth just their face value £0.001 each.... Tomorrow that value could soar!  All we need are members who become involved: we will take care of the rest. Our aim is to seek a stock market listing in 2012/13 and to create an income stream from business members who are given a new way of reaching customers.

How much do we expect our shares to be worth?  

Based on financial projections from inworld sales, business members and connected business activity and investment we are aiming for a share price of £0.58 by 2012/13 (please see www.xe.com/ucc for local currency).  We have innovative marketing solutions that will protect your privacy but also allow you to control how advertisers and business members interact with you.  In fact you also become part of their sales solution!

-------

It appears that they are creating something out of nothing. All they do is to give you a virtual share with no fundamental value (like normal stocks), and expects everybody to start selling them to each other.

"...inworld sales, business members and connected business activity and investment"

The above is plain bullshit, they are not even a publisted company in any country, and they have no information about the type of activities that they are in.

Crazy!? This may sound ridiculous and we suspect that this scheme is illegal.

What we suspect that they would do is simply to:

1) Artificially jack up the price of the shares later, making everybody think: Oh my free shares now is worth $0.50!

2) Commit some funds to actually buy up some shares from the members, making everybody excited that: Hey, someone actually bought my shares and I earned free money!

3) As the news spread, as the price goes up (by itself, self-driven sentiments), people will find that they are trading virtual (fundamentally worthless) shares to each other.

By fundamentally worthless means that the shares is not worth a cent in the real commercial world. It is not attached to real world earnings, or tangible assets, etc. Its just some numbers on your computer screen that you can sell to each other.

In our opinion, this reminds us of a Ponzi system - whoever is the last person to buy and holding the highest price, will be the biggest loser.

Any comments are appreciated. As we have signed up and read about the "scheme", please provide concrete evidence against what we think this is a scam.

(NOTE: This article is not an invitation for you to try out the above website. We are NOT affiliated to them, and we think the scheme is a Scam or illegal.)