Quote:
Originally posted by RougeUnderoos@May 11 2005, 05:20 AM
I read something recently about a couple kids in the States who went to an ice cream shop and filled out some forms so they would get mailed a voucher for free ice cream on their birthday.
Seems that free ice cream just once a year wasn't enough for these lads though so they made up a few fake names (ie "Joe Blow") and birthdates, put down their real address and sent it in.
I don't know how much ice-cream they got out of it in the meantime but a few years went by and lo and behold the house gets a "you Mr. Joe Blow must now register with the draft board because you are 18 years old" letter from the military. It seems that the government had bought the customer list from the cold-treat-shack and were checking it to make sure no 18 y.o. was missing from the potential soldier list. The fake person, invented for a free cone, was being told to register.
The ice cream lovers' dad was a lawyer or some such thing and was looking to raise a stink about it. I can't find a link right now but I promise to keep looking.
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this may have been an extrapolation of a real-life situation in the 1960s,
where a large ice cream chain (baskin & robbins?) sold birthday lists to the US draft board.
free ice cream,
viet fata nam!
the cards had birthdate, address, name, all far more up-to-date than the US databases at the time.
i read aboot it in a text book for college, information gathering, etc. stuck with me as a 40-year-old example of what corporations will do for a nickel.