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One of the beauties of online communities is the relative ease with which they help to bring the world's most infinitely glamorous and important people—Paris Hilton, for example—in contact with their legions of utterly ordinary, pimple-faced fans. For while playing "Paris Hilton's Jewel Jam" in a tub brimming with her exclusive fragrance as her infectious CD blasts through an adjacent boombox offers an adequately simulative experience, it's really not until you've been granted the hotly desired "add" to her roster of MySpace BFFship that you can truly boast of virtually "rolling with the heiress." But as with any electronic cult of personality steeped in Orwellian undertones, sometimes something that seems so good can turn out to be quite the opposite:

Several furious sources who are on the list of the heiress' friends via her MySpace account say they received emails supposedly from Hilton telling them that they'd won an expense-paid trip to meet her. When the "friends" clicked on the e-mail, they were taken to another screen, telling them, "Hurry! Only twenty prizes left."

They were then forwarded to a series of pop-up messages and questionnaires asking them to buy products and requesting them to supply personal information.

If the "friend" refuses to supply the info, the screen freezes, says one angry source. If however, the information is supplied, a message appears, saying, "Thank you for signing up for our offers, but all the prizes are gone. Your email is now on a spam list and you win nothing!"

A visit to Hilton's official MySpace page offers little hint of the groundswell of acrimony currently building against her, nor could we detect any resentment on her message boards, where the general sentiment alternates between one of undying gratitude for "the add," and the revelation, posted 28 times, that someone named "Mike Zeidman" was "MTV'S NEW BAD ASS." Enthusiastic discourse aside, Hilton should remain vigilant that similar mishaps don't repeat themselves, lest her database of freespending followers begin to associate the classy starlet with such unseemly and totally unrelated subject matter as penis enlargements and bulk-ordered pills procurable without a valid prescription.