Free membership loophole?!

I was browsing around Chess.com, and found the following under "Widgets and Badges":

Earn 30 days of free Chess.com Premium Membershipfor each person you refer and become a Premium Member!

Put the widgets, badges, or banners below on your homepage, blog, or profile page to let others know about Chess.com! Copy the code below onto your page - it will automatically be updated with your info and you will get credited with the referral!

So apparently every time somoene clicks a link with your special referral code (with "?ref_id=XXXXXXX" after every link) you get a credit worth 30 days of memebership. I am dubious about this and wonder if there is a catch; does anyone know anything about this?

A referal is somebody who buys a membership after clicking on your link.

This does not seem very logical since "become a Premium Member!" was implied to be the direct result of referring people; additionally, the sentence could not have meant that you earn 30 days of membership for each person who was referred AND became a member. More likely, the "and" in the sentence suggested that it was the person posting the link would get the membership as a result, rather than saying that the referred person must become a member as well, since that would be quite awkward in the tense the sentence used.

EDIT: Okay, this was messy so see my next post. ☺

I agree with rooperi's comment. Although this sentence suggests that you get 30 days of premium membership for every person who clicks your link and creates an account, I think it is just poorly worded. "... and become a premium member" basically repeats what the sentence said before "and," so I'm guessing that that's not what the sentence means. What the chess.com staff wanted to say was probably "Earn 30 days of free Chess.com Premium Membershipfor each person that you refer who becomes a Premium Member!"

Again, this does not seem to be the case (even if it is ☺) because of the wording of the sentence. There is an issue with the second part of the sentence: that section implies "Earn 30 days of Premium Membership for each person you refer, and become a Premium Member". It could not be suggesting that the referred person actually had to become a member as well, since the verb "become" is plural. Since the referred person is a singular noun, the verb must also be singular in the form "becomes". On the other hand, if the sentence means that the referring person gets the membership, it would be correct because plural verbs are used with second-person nouns ("you (have) become"), which is the case because the reader is directly being spoken to.

To conclude, the tense of the sentence implies that it is the referring person that is getting the membership, since if the referred person got the membership the grammar would be incorrect.

Yeah, at best the sentence is clumsy and ambiguous...

Chess.com should add a spelling/grammar checker.

Perhaps you'll get an official response here.

Why don't you sue them, Apple style? ;)

No need -- they crowdsource this.

I am official administrator John Lennon teaching you how the loophole was creatend:

chess administrators want free memberships to be social revolutionaries like CHE GUEVARA because capitalism is bad and will decay into fecal matter as a MATTER of FACT they are social revolutionaries because like ARMED GUERRILLA they put free memberships against capitalism that is Why the l00pho7e was cretaend. 

if you want to know how thenk ask madministrators