The original "Make Money Fast" letter was written around 1988 by a person who used the name Dave Rhodes.
According to the FAQ of the net.legends Usenet news group, Dave Rhodes was a student at Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University), a Seventh-day Adventist college in Maryland, who wrote the letter and uploaded it as a text file to a nearby BBS around 1987.
[9] The text of the letter originally claimed this practice is "perfectly legal", citing Title 18, Sections 1302 & 1341 of the postal lottery laws.
Postal Inspection Service asserts the mathematical impossibility that all participants will be winners, as well as the possibilities that participants may fail to send money to the first person listed, and the perpetrator may have been listed multiple times under different addresses and names, thus ensuring that all the money goes to the same person.
While the specific laws mentioned above will only be violated if regular postal mail is used at some point during the process of communication,[11] the sending of chain letters is often prohibited by the terms of service and/or user agreements of many email providers, and can result in an account being suspended or revoked.