Tag: Online Scams

1 Weird Old Trick to Lose Money Fast!

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I’m only going to say this once, because it’s pretty simple:

If you see a banner advertisement that promises to reveal “1 Weird Old Trick” to lose weight (or “1 Weird Old Tip” to achieve anything), you are looking at a scam.

I know you’ve seen these ads. If you’ve looked at the Weather Channel, any of the major news providers, or even your local newspaper’s website, you have. Maybe you’ve even wondered, “So, what’s the weird old trick?”

The weird old trick is this: if you click on the ad, you’ll end up at one of about ten zillion websites that promise free samples of weight loss and other remedies that just don’t work; Acai berries are one of the most common. In ordering your “free” sample, you must provide a credit card number. They’ll start hitting your account with monthly charges soon afterwards. If you try to get them to stop, the phone numbers they provide either won’t work, or you’ll find you get “disconnected” a lot (in other words, whoever’s at the call center just hangs up on you). It’s actually a lot like the old “Google Kit” scam from a while back.

There’s a bright spot in all of this, though. According to a recent article from the Washington Post, the feds are cracking down on this scheme. I’ve already noticed the ads seem to have mostly disappeared. Score one for the good guys!

Online Scams Epilogue: How to actually make money on the Internet

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So, how do you make money on the Internet?

Perhaps I’ve given the impression that it can’t be done, but that’s not true. However, the answer may not be what you want to hear.

Basically, you have to have something or create something that other people want, and figure out how to deliver it over the Internet.

The easiest way is the most obvious: sell things on eBay. If you have a supply of antiques, collectables or anything else lots of people desire, create an eBay account and go for it. It’s probably not going to be a full-time career or bring you millions of dollars (unless you’re extremely shrewd), but it can be a source of income that doesn’t involve a ton of work on your part.

Other than that, you pretty much have to create something. If you make things by hand, there’s a site called Etsy that allows you to put up a “store” for your wares. Again, it’s probably not going to be a career, but it’s a way to leverage a hobby into extra income.

The blogging world has some success stories. A lot of sites (I Can Has Cheezburger? comes to mind) that have become cultural icons are essentially using a fairly standard blog format. They mostly generate income through advertising revenue (and some of them get book deals later on).

It’s tough to do, but it can be done. Remember; Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were all created by small groups of people with ideas for sites people might like.

So that’s how you make money on the Internet: create content that people want, or sell a service or product. Perhaps there was a time when putting up a page with nothing but paid links to other sites would have worked, but those days are long gone. The Internet just isn’t “neat” enough anymore, in and of itself, for that sort of thing to work. You’ve got to create your own business on the Internet. It’s not easy, and you might fail over and over, but I hear it’s a pretty sweet life when it works.

Online Scams Vol. 3: Work at home scams are everywhere

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Crooks these days. They’re nothing if not adaptable.

Have you seen the number of work-at-home “jobs” being offered on the Internet these days? They know what’s up. A lot of people are losing their jobs and are looking for something new. And it’s a great American tradition—recession (or depression) takes your job, start your own business!

However, the fact is that most people don’t have the right kind of entrepreneurial “spark” needed to start a successful business venture. It takes a certain kind of grit, a deep belief in yourself and your “product,” the ability to hold your head high when faced with failure (and to learn from that failure and move on, instead of taking it personally and wallowing in it), and the kind of positive attitude that, frankly, tends to get obliterated when you’re worrying about how you’re going to pay the mortgage next week.

Let’s face it: starting your own business is way, way tougher than working for someone else. How many times have you seen someone start their own little store because they were “tired of working 40 hours a week,” and you check out their new digs and they’ve got no clear vision for their business, they’re trying to be everything to everyone, and they’re only open five or six hours per day because they’re trying to make owning a business easier than working for someone else? How long did they last?

And I think most of us, deep down, know that. “I’d love to work for myself, but yeesh! 18 hour days, seven days a week?” It’s okay to admit that you’re not a natural born entrepreneur (can you become one? Of course. You can become anything you intend). But most of us know—it is a path of great resistance.

Send in the Work-at-Home-Scam Clowns.

They sound great, don’t they? Stay at home, do some menial task that takes ten minutes, and let “the power of the Internet” (or something) do the rest. You’ll have so many Porsches by this time next year, you won’t know what to do with them all!

Of course I’m going to tell you they’re all completely full of baloney. Nobody is going to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for nothing.

“Oh, but they’re not paying you,” you’ll say. “You’re starting your own business!”

Well, at best you’re going to pay them a large amount of money for a “startup kit,” fees, or other such bull. You’re not going to assemble kits at home, you’re not going to enter any data, and you’re not going to get paid to stuff envelopes. You’re going to get ripped off.

Fraud.org (run by the National Consumers League) has a great article called “Tips for Avoiding Work-at-Home Scams.” I would recommend you take a few minutes to read the entire article, but the following is a summary of their tips:

  • Know who you’re dealing with
  • Don’t believe that you can make big profits easily
  • Be cautious about emails offering work-at-home opportunities (real companies do not recruit in this way. Ever)
  • Get all the details before you pay
  • Find out if there is really a market for your work
  • Get references for other people who are doing the work
  • Be aware of legal requirements (medical billing requires a license, for example)
  • Know the refund policy
  • Be wary of offers to send you an “advance” on your “pay”
  • Do your own research about work-at-home opportunities

I would amend that fourth tip slightly: just don’t ever pay someone else to work for them.

About.com also has a nice article on this topic: “Work at Home Scams.” I’d suggest you read this as well.

Finally, never, ever trust the phrase, “Other work at home sites are scams, but I found one that isn’t!” There are tons of fake blogs out there. I even found one by searching for “work at home scams.” It had a whole article, possibly culled from a trusted news source, about avoiding these traps. It claimed to be an article from a newspaper in Cleveland. As you read, you suddenly find you’ve been eased into a sales pitch about how “this one isn’t a scam!”

Do they need to make it any more obvious?

Online Scams Vol. 2: A few more words about Google scams

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Do a Google search on something. “Fender Telecaster,” whatever. We’ll go with that, since it’s a topic I’m interested in.

Hey, this is a blog, not a democracy.

Now look at the results page that appears. The two-thirds of the screen on your left contains your regular search results. The right third of the screen, however, is a list of paid advertisements. See how it says “Sponsored Links” at the top? That means those are not “pure” search results. Those are Google AdWords listings. Every result in this list is there because somebody paid to have it there.

Now look closely at your “regular” results. For most searches, you’ll see it once again again—”Sponsored Links.” There is a very pale yellow background behind the first couple results. Once again, the owners of those sites paid money for their businesses to appear there. The first “real” search result (if you use our “Fender Telecaster” example) is a page hosted at Fender.com, which makes sense.

My goal here is first to point out how there is just a massive amount of advertising on the Internet, even when performing a simple Google search.

Secondly, my goal is to point out that these advertisements are not from Google. No matter what those “Sponsored Links” say, they are not affiliated with Google (unless you search “Google” or “AdSense” or “AdWords,” which are legitimate).

Search “make money with Google” and a whole bunch of sponsored links come up on your right…and they’re all scams, as far as I can tell. “$100,000/month Guaranteed” my foot. That one even says it up front: you have to pay them to sign up, which is one of the easiest ways to detect a scam.

(By the way, do NOT click any of these links if you’re actually doing these searches along with me. This is your one warning. I am not responsible if you ignore it.)

Supposedly, Google is cracking down on these scams, or at least trying to stop them from appearing on their own advertising setup. However, as of today, these scams are still rampant, and they’re still using Google AdWords to lure people in.

If you are interesting in using AdWords to advertise your business, or using AdSense to make money from your blog or other website, make sure you’re at the actual sites hosted by Google. The links I provided above are the real ones. By the way, anyone telling you that you have to pay them to sign up for AdSense is scamming you, too. It doesn’t cost you anything to participate in that program.

Here’s a short list of Google scams I have heard of so far. Do not trust any of these, or anything that sounds even a little bit like them:

  • Google Works
  • Google Kit
  • Google Money System
  • Google Cash
  • Google Cash Kit
  • Make Money Posting Links on Google
  • Easy Google Profit
  • Google Treasure Chest
  • Scott’s Money Blog
  • Josh Made Cash
  • Earn Cash Fast With Google
  • Joan’s Money Making Story

This list probably doesn’t even scratch the surface. Those last four are fake blog sites that are supposed to make you think they’re written by somebody “just like yourself.” They even have an embedded program that figures out where your location is, and makes it sound like the blog’s “author” is from nearby.

So, keep your head about you when you’re running a Google search. Those Sponsored Links aren’t your most trustworthy source of information. And just don’t fall for anything that promises huge amounts of money involving Google.

Heck, even with AdSense, unless your blog is getting thousands of hits per day, you’re probably not going to make more than a few dollars. I’m not saying don’t do it. After all, passive income is the best income, don’t you think?

Online Scams Vol. 1: Words that mean it’s probably a scam.

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In the late 1990s, the Internet really captured the collective imagination as a way to make a ton of money. There was the classic depiction of a “Dot-Com Startup,” a company made up entirely of hip, cynical recent college grads (or even precocious dropouts) who made instant millions by apparently wearing cargo shorts to work and spending the entire day playing foosball in open-design offices with weird artwork all over the place.

I’m still not sure how their business model worked (and ultimately, it didn’t), but that was the popular image. The ones who were smart enough to sell before anyone noticed they were just playing hackey-sack all day made a lot of cash.

You’ve also got stories like Google and Facebook and Twitter—sites that were started by small groups of people, that became massive online juggernauts.

Yep. The Internet has definitely made quite a few millionaires. We all know it, and that’s why so many people are getting ripped off: online moneymaking schemes.

First off, the people who have truly made lasting fortunes on the Internet did so by offering something unique that lots of people wanted. They created something. They didn’t go to a website and sign up for an “affiliate program” that required them to give their credit card numbers.

That’s why I’m doing a little series this week on the world of online scams. Today’s topic: words that are a pretty good sign you’re looking at a scam.

If the URL (address line) of the site, or if the name of the site have any of the following words in it, you are very likely going to lose money very quickly if you hand over your credit card information:

  • fun
  • free
  • profit
  • money
  • million
  • cash
  • fast
  • rich
  • wealth
  • internet
  • online
  • web
  • immediate
  • instant

Just…don’t trust these sites. I don’t care what they’re called. FunInternetProfits, InstantOnlineMillions, FastInternetCash, whatever. I’m just making those names up, but I can almost guarantee they’re real sites (do NOT visit them, though. You’ve been warned).

For one thing, what website has the word “Internet” or “online” in its name anymore? Do you really need to specify that in 2009?

For another, why is it that “fast cash, no work!” sounds like a complete rip off when it’s an ad in the back of Rolling Stone, but when it’s on a website, people fall for it? Anyone can put up a website, folks. Terrorist groups that operate in complete secrecy have websites. There is no vetting process for having a website.

There is also a special case: scams that try to latch onto Google. There’s one called Google Works that I know of specifically. They start by charging you $1.97 for…well, they don’t really tell you. Then they take $69.97 from you every month. See, they’re taking money from you. That’s the opposite of profit.

There are many more of these Google scams. Google Cash is one I’ve heard of, but I’m sure Google Profit, Google Millions and Google Wealth are out there somewhere. They’re all scams. Don’t even try.

Now, Google does run an affiliate program called AdSense that’s legitimate. A lot of bloggers use this on their sites. It generates little ads that are probably related to the content of your blog. In this case, you’re hoping visitors to your site will click on these ads, which will generate a few cents for you. However, unless you’re running a site that gets a few hundred thousand visits per month or more, you’re not going to make a whole lot from it.

The other problem with AdSense is that sometimes ads for scams using Google’s name show up. That means ads for Google Works and other scams are using Google’s legit advertising affiliate program to lure people. I think Google needs to pay more attention to the people they allow to advertise through their program, don’t you?

Also an exception: there is a site called Get Rich Slowly, a blog that provides excellent financial advice from a guy who’s gone from a heavy debt burden to debt free over the course of a few years. He’s not selling anything (unless he has a book out that I don’t know about), and he’s not offering a way for you to make money. You go to the site to read articles and learn. Make sure you’re at getrichslowly.ORG, not COM. The COM is somebody trying to sell website addresses (a very 1995-style business venture). Avoid.