Web Currencies rely on hamster based reward systems to lure los-- err, users.

A local Santa Clara man has little reason to celebrate after realizing he was suckered into visiting a web based currency site and spending "many evenings" accumulating "banana bucks", which, in the end, earned him "The crappiest plastic pair of headphones you ever saw."

Brody Mack first went to treeloot.com after clicking on a banner ad for the site, which featured a boxing glove and a dodging monkey. "It said if I punched the monkey, I'd win $100, or something like that. I tried and tried, but I kept missing. Finally, my wife came in and hit that little sucker the first try. Pow! I pretty much figured I'd be getting $100 check in the mail, feeling a little sneaky, what, with the fact my wife had actually been the monkey puncher. That's when I realized I had actually won 100 "banana bucks" or some such crap.

above: Wily monkey urges visitors to treeloot to
keep trying; they're getting closer to the $100 prize.

After the popup banner took Brody to the treeloot.com site, it wasn't long until Brody was hooked on trying to find the $1,000 prize that was somewhere on a huge .jpg drawing of a tree.

"The monkey kept saying I was getting warmer, but when I looked closer at the mouse coordinates, I realized that the odds of me actually hitting the exact pixel were probably about the odds of me hitting the $6,000,000 super lotto, and this was just a $1,000 prize." Lamented Brody. "Still, I kept on racking up banana bucks, thinking that a banana buck must be like a US dollar, otherwise it wouldn't be called a buck."

Above, Brody tries to stay awake after the
previous night's monkey hunting adventure.

After spending "A God-awful lot of time." including his traditional Monday Night football nights at the PC, clicking away at the treeloot site, Brody realized he had racked up 18,000 banana bucks. "All of those bananas were burning a hole in my pocket, so I went to spend them. I was hoping to get a big screen HDTV or maybe a jet ski for those hundreds of hours spent clicking on the tree and visiting sponser site after sponser site. After reviewing my options, I realized I was faced with 2 choices: A pair of headphones, or a Fossil pack of Pokemon cards."

2 months later, the headphones, complete with the way-too short 2 ft cord and flimsy plastic construction arrived, along with a treeloot.com T-Shirt in XXX Large, with a monkey swimming in a pool of cash that reads: "I won at treeloot.com!"

Brody admits he's learned a lot from the lesson at treeloot.com. "Enough of this crazy web-based rewards stuff. From now on, I'm sticking to only web-based currencies, like beenz or Trocas."