freeipods.com

It seems "legit", but yeah, you need to constantly draw more people into it, so if you're not one of the first, and don't have a large pool of friends that can reliably sign up, then you're better off just buying an Ipod (or whatever they're offering).

You can probably sort of scam them by signing up for a trial offer or something (blockbuster might work, unless they're making you wait until the trial period ends now before they send it in), have 5 of your buddies do the same thing, and once they get confirmation emails, then cancel the trial (or something to that effect).

The wikipedia article (and one of the links on the bottom) mention websites where people apparently repeatedly sign up for stuff, and others on that site do so as well to help them (and get helped in return), but I don't know of any sites that do that "conga line" thing (wired seems to have a link to one, but it seems suspicious to me).

All in all, I wouldn't bother with it (particularly not for stuff like the Xbox360). And anyone posting those threads here asking for peeps to sign up should be banned immediately (particularly if they're a new account and only have a few posts at most. Maybe we should write a program that detects a spam link to one of those sites, it should auto delete the message or something lol).

Jam it back in, in the dark.