Ok, so I hope this doesn't break forum rules. I tried looking for a list, but couldn't find them 
So I don't know about you guys, but a FREE Xbox 360 Elite sounds pretty good right now. Anyway, so this company is totally legit according to CNN, G4, and plenty of other news stations. All you have to do is follow this link, complete an offer to someplace like Gamefly or Blockbuster, refer some friends and wait for the Xbox to come to you. Extremely simple and saves you a lot of money! Go ahead, give it a try!
http://www.360Elite4free.com/index.php?ref=5736113
The problem with referral programs like this is there is just a certain pool of users who will ever want to participate, and there can only be a small number of lucky few who sit at the "base", so to speak, of the referral chain. Others involved in this will advertise in the same places you will and the odds of you getting all the referrals needed are low. It's basically just a form of Internet advertising, with "points" paid out instead of cash. Except you can actually do things with cash. You can't with points in your account that are not quite enough to get the prize you want. The vast majority of the users will not accrue enough points to get a prize, and will get absolutely nothing in exchange for the work and advertising they've done for this company. When they go out of business, all those points will be lost.
Back in the late 90s there was a wave of "pay to surf" programs which would pay you to look at ads, and they had similar multi-level referral programs. Amazingly, these actually paid out, until their investor money ran out. (They certainly weren't profitable, heh.) The ones that stayed in business the longest were the ones with extremely low payout rates (like 1/15 the rates of the first ones or less).
