What do all those "click here and win ______!" really do?

[Hank the Tank]

I've never been so gullible as to actually click on one of those, but what do they lead you to?

They have to give you a "free" ______ somewhere in there don't they? Otherwise it would be flase advertising, right?

[pixelante_ninja]

What they do is that they have you give them your email adress.
Then you get spammed the hell out of and have to complete some of their offers, eventually you have to refer your friends to the program and after you've sold your soul and done nothing but type for 6 months you get your free ____.

[Garrett]

It was either Game Informer or Electronic Games Monthly that ran an article on one of these. They actually signed up for one of these "Get a free PS2" offers and got one after about half a year or so.

To do so, they had to to through some trouble, and then cancel out each of the offer before a credit card was charged. Calling and emailing them on a weekly basis, complete with a paper and pen in hand to keep track on who's who. Not ordering anything. Eventually they got the console.

But then the next month, someone wrote to them stating that they tried it, and some companies will refuse to cancel in time, & had a lot of trouble doing it.

In the end, it can't be worth it, unless you don't have to worry about a job, school, bills, family, and you'd much rather spend time dealing with companies, waiting on the phone, checking email, then actually playing a game.

[Ace_ofspade]

I once tried it to see what its like. Basically, you're taken to a website where you give them your e-mail address, and are given an "account". You'll get spammed to hell, but once you have one, you can do more of them through this account as long as it's through the same service. After this, you go through 3 "steps" where you pretty much just support their sponsors, I was careful to only try the free/easy ones. In each step, they give you a big list of possible "credits". Each one is worth a different number of credits, and once you have enough, you move to the next step where more credits are required. The things range from downloading a demo of AOL to buying 10 99¢ cookbooks. I grew bored and gave up after the first few hours, and as you can tell, its not easy and pretty time consuming. After you complete all 3 steps, I heard from a friend, you just send them your address and they ship you your "free" whatever.

EDIT: This took me so long to type up I didn't see Garrett's more accurate description of the signing up for different services. Yeah, once you get far enough into it, you have to call and order services, and like I said, I didn't get that far.

[Theory?]

The effort and potential money you may lose attempting to get the ____ is probably equal or greater than just going to the store and buying your very own friggin _____.

[Thefremen]

The effort and potential money you may lose attempting to get the ____ is probably equal or greater than just going to the store and buying your very own friggin _____.

Are we playing Mad Libs now?