I for one support Chawin’s right to pay me in one imaginary currency, to have me give them email addresses I don’t use, so that he can obtain another imaginary currency that may be tradeable for real items.

In terms of time/money spent… I bumume he’s smart enough to at least not pay more in BP-bribery costs than the value of what he gets back, so the question is one of time spent vs net gain in stuff. If his time isn’t worth very much (i.e. time spent on Lockerz would otherwise have been spent on something even less worthwhile) then it may well work out to be economically sound.

There is the fact that Lockerz is almost certainly making more money from the info people give them than they give out in prizes. If they have a working business model anyway. So from that angle it’s quite scammy. But on the other hand, if I wanted to sell my info to marketers directly, I doubt they’d be interested, so Lockerz could act as a middle man for that transaction. Plus they give the same reward for fake info as the real thing – all the honest idiots get to subsidise the fakers. (On the other other hand, they aren’t headlining with “we’ll sell your details and preferences to marketers and give you a percentage” – they’re billing it as easy free stuff with no costs whatsoever, which takes it back to scamminess)

I’m sort of wondering whether it was worth my time going through the sign-up process for the BP, but hey… effectively free BP, I’m not complaining.