No Pay Classifieds

I am a subscriber and avid reader of 2600 Magazine. They have a section near the back of the magazine called 2600 Magazine Marketplace. Subscribers are allowed to advertise for free in this section. Sometimes the ads are as entertaining as the articles in the magazine. Last month an ad for No Pay Classifieds caught my eye. The ad also asked for people to link to the web site. I thought it might be good to help a fellow subscriber by linking to the site. However I decided to check the site out before recommending it. I was amused at what I found.

Apparently the no pay classifieds site is a front end to a big database that will serve up free ads specific to your geographic location. I was not about to type in any information about where I live. This site was founded by a guy advertising in a hacker magazine after all. So I tried to do some searches without entering my address. I never got any results. Now I am not sure if this is due to the fact that I did not enter my location information, or whether the site was broken. All I know is that I cannot in good faith recommend the site to anybody.

The site itself was not the real news story here. The real kicker was the story about the founder John Lambros. This guy has a huge web site documenting his bad experience in Brazil. Apparently this United States citizen was in Brazil and got arrested. A bunch of Brazilian lawyers proceeded to milk John and his family of a lot of money. They John claims he was tortured while in prison in Brazil. Furthermore John says they implanted a device in his brain to monitor and control him. Finally he was extradited to the United States where he is serving a very long prison sentence. John’s conclusion in the matter is that everyone should boycott Brazil as a result of his times there.
I have to give it to this guy. He has a huge amount of documentation published on the web about his story. There are a lot of copies of legal matters in the courts. And there is even an x-ray photograph of his brain implements. Now I cannot say for sure which if any part of his story is true. But the whole thing comes off as being crazy. The part about the brain implant drove it over the top. If you really want to get a taste of what I am talking about, do a Google search for boycott Brazil and you will see what I mean