Be­ware These In­ter­net Busi­ness Scams, Ques­tion­able Tac­tics & H

From Willie Craw­ford.

When it comes to mak­ing money on­line, you’ll find that there are a lot of ques­tion­able claims float­ing around out there. Thank­fully there aren’t too many out­right scams, and most of those you can iden­tify fairly easily.

The real prob­lem is the plethora of out­ra­geous claims of overnight for­tunes, ques­tion­able „busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties”, and half truths.

Scams can range from ponzi schemes to mod­ern ver­sions of mail fraud and on­line chain let­ters. Once you’re look­ing for ways to make money on­line for a lit­tle while, you’re sure to come across some of these:

Gift­ing Schemes - It’s not il­le­gal to give an in­di­vid­ual a gift of money but it IS il­le­gal to try and make money with gift­ing schemes. Any kind of gift­ing „sys­tem” or „busi­ness op­por­tu­nity” is some­thing to stay miles away from, be­cause peo­ple get ar­rested and jailed for these types of scams frequently.

You’ll find many peo­ple in­volved in gift­ing schemes who will ar­gue with you un­til they are blue in the face, but all of the gift­ing schemes that I’ve looked at ARE illegal.

Money Col­lec­tions - These types of scams are dis­guised in many forms, but the ba­sic setup usu­ally claims to be a job of­fer. The „com­pany” needs work­ers in the U.S. to col­lect money from their clients, and for­ward that money on to them. The „worker” un­for­tu­nately sends the com­pany money from their own bank ac­count, only to find out later that the client pay­ments or de­posits were fraudulent.

I know peo­ple who have been ar­rested for ac­cept­ing and trans­fer­ring pay­ments that turned out to be fraud­u­lent. They were held re­spon­si­ble for those fund!

There are hun­dreds more scams and il­le­gal „op­por­tu­ni­ties” on­line, but the two above are quite com­mon and they should help you to start be­ing able to eas­ily iden­tify oth­ers you may come across in the future.

Shady Tac­tics and Half Truths are more dif­fi­cult to iden­tify, thus they’re much eas­ier to fall for. Some peo­ple con­tinue to fall for these types of „op­por­tu­ni­ties” though. Let’s look at a cou­ple of examples…

Data En­try Jobs - There are valid data en­try jobs on­line but they’re not nearly as pro­lific as some of the ad­ver­tise­ments would have you be­lieve. And un­for­tu­nately many say that all you have to do is type ads into a form on Google, and you’ll earn $x per ad. The truth of the mat­ter is that you have to pay for the ads you place on Google, and not every ad you place will ac­tu­ally earn you money. Af­ter plac­ing the ads, peo­ple have to click on your ad and ac­tu­ally make some sort of pur­chase be­fore you’ll earn anything.

The ac­tual process is a bit com­pli­cated and it takes quite awhile for most peo­ple to learn. If you’re in­ter­ested in un­der­stand­ing more about how this works, search the web for „Google Ad­Words” and you will find thou­sands of pages of in­for­ma­tion avail­able about it. Do not how­ever, pay for a ser­vice, book, job, or op­por­tu­nity which claims you can make money do­ing „data en­try” like this on Google or any other on­line ad­ver­tis­ing sites.

Even peo­ple who use Google Ad­Words pro­fes­sion­ally of­ten lose money. It’s a method of gen­er­at­ing busi­ness that re­quires a LOT of know-how and test­ing. It’s not some­thing that a com­pany would hire an in­ex­pe­ri­enced per­son to do! The pros of­ten lose money on 8 out of 10 ads that they place.

Sur­vey Jobs - There are also many places on­line where you can le­git­i­mately make money tak­ing sur­veys and fill­ing out opin­ion polls. The le­git­i­mate forms of these op­por­tu­ni­ties are few and far be­tween, but many prod­ucts and ser­vices want you to be­lieve that you can make hun­dreds of dol­lars each week on­line with sur­veys… if you just pay them $49.95 first.

It is quite pos­si­ble to be paid for do­ing sur­veys, and there are many sites you can sign up to on­line which give you the in­for­ma­tion for free. Usu­ally how­ever, you re­ceive very few sur­veys to fill out reg­u­larly. In fact, get­ting just one each month is rare. There are also many places which will send you many sur­veys each month, but af­ter spend­ing 10-15 min­utes or more fill­ing out each one you find at the end that you’re not qual­i­fied for that sur­vey, thus they aren’t go­ing to pay you any­thing for it.

Many of the sites that you see ad­ver­tis­ing „get­ting paid for tak­ing sur­veys” merely pro­vide a scant list of a few sur­veys that you may be able to take. They charge you a small for­tune for in­for­ma­tion that is read­ily avail­able for free.

Last but not least, there are sales let­ters which are de­signed to make you be­lieve you can be­come a mil­lion­aire overnight, or claim to have the „se­cret” to mak­ing easy money with your com­puter, and so on and so forth. These claims are usu­ally based on some level of truth, but they of­ten leave out some crit­i­cal de­tails, or they gloss over the fact that it could take years to reach a cer­tain in­come level.

Many of the peo­ple mak­ing the kind of money ad­ver­tised were in mail or­der or di­rect sales, or copy­writ­ing, for a decade or more be­fore mov­ing their busi­nesses on­line. They are NOT av­er­age peo­ple who just worked 9-to-5 jobs in a pre­vi­ous life. If you read the small print at the bot­tom of many of their web­pages you’ll see a state­ment say­ing their re­sults are NOT typical.

Of­ten, what they don’t say in their sales let­ter (web­page) is more im­por­tant than what they do say.

For ex­am­ple, one money mak­ing op­por­tu­nity may claim that you can make $1000 every day fol­low­ing their busi­ness model. What you may not re­al­ize how­ever - and they don’t al­ways re­veal - is that they spent $995 to make that $1000. Or that they were able to make $1000 once in the last 5 years.

Many peo­ple do some­thing once that does make them a lot of money, then they cre­ate a prod­uct teach­ing how they did that. They make many times more money teach­ing their method. The prob­lem is that the prod­uct may teach some­thing that they did five or more years ago - some­thing that no longer works!

You also need to be aware that many peo­ple will make claims, then pro­vide „proof” of their claims with pic­tures of in­come screen shots or checks they’ve re­ceived. Be aware that it’s very easy to edit pic­tures with soft­ware, so the amounts of money stated in those „proof” pic­tures may be falsified.

It is il­le­gal to make false claims but many of these shady char­ac­ters sim­ply don’t care. In other cases, those mak­ing the false claims live in places where law en­force­ment is eas­ily bribed or non-existent.

When it comes to on­line claims of how easy it is to make money, you can’t go wrong if you live by the old say­ing, „If it sounds too good to be true, then it prob­a­bly is!”

-----------------

Willie Craw­ford has been teach­ing peo­ple to build a le­git­i­mate in­ter­net busi­ness since 1996. He is one of the world’s lead­ing web­site traf­fic gen­er­a­tion ex­perts. His fa­vorite tool is an au­to­mated ar­ti­cle, video, pod­cast and press re­lease sub­mis­sion ser­vice at https://ibmm.com/epbt Visit them now.

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.