5 Ways To Spot Scammers Online And Avoid Losing Your Money

In your quest to make money on the Internet, you need to be careful of scammers. These are people who set up websites or systems on the Internet for the purpose of deceiving unsuspecting people into making payments to them for a service or product they will not deliver.

Having had a first hand experience with these swindlers, I want to share with you some ways by which you can identify them and so avoid falling into their antics and losing your hard earned money.

Pay To Do Jobs Websites

There are some websites out there on the Internet telling you they have jobs you can start doing immediately from home and earning lots of money, but you will have to make some small payments to them first to be able to get these jobs.

Many, if not all of these kind of websites are scam. In particular are the ones that promise data entry jobs. You should run away from data entry jobs offer, they are scammers. This is how they deceive and rip people off their money:

They tell you they have loads of jobs that involve just entering data, which could make you up to $750 each day. To make the offer irresistible, they will say when you register with them after making payment of say $45, you will instantly have $60 in your account, and you will be able to withdraw when your earnings reach a minimum of $100. But they know you will never make up to $100 to withdraw – it’s only a trick.

After you make the payment to register, like I did some time ago, to test such offers, you will be asked to be submitting some text ad in free classified advert sites, and that it is when people click on the advert that you can earn $1 for a click that must be verified by them to be true. This of course wasn’t what they said in their sales copy.

And of course, you will never get clicks even if you spend all day and night, seven days a week, submitting their ads to classified advert sites – I tried for a few weeks with enthusiasm, but got frustrated when I didn’t see any dollar. When I decided to use their money-back guarantee promise, and ask for my money back, I discovered I couldn’t log in to my account anymore, and not long after the website went off the Internet.

So, like I said before, run away from ‘pay to do data entering jobs’, and in general all ‘pay to do jobs’, including online survey – you may see money in your account, but you will never be able to withdraw any. Why would anyone who needs people to work for them ask them to pay before given the job? These scammers will say the reason they are asking you to make payment first is to ensure only serious people who will do the job register. But it’s a lie.

Buying Your Website Or Domain For $50,000

There are scammers who will send you a mail saying they are interested in buying your domain name or website for as much as $50,000. Having gotten your interest, they will now demand that they need to have a trusted company evaluate the domain or website before they will buy it from you.

Then they will skillfully guide you to another of their scam websites that offers domain and website evaluation service to do the evaluation there. They will insist that it is only the evaluation from that website that they will accept. They will even direct you to a blog or forum they have also set up (without you knowing it’s theirs) where the comments there spoke glowingly about using the service of the domain and website evaluation company they want you to patronize.

If you are not careful, you could easily fall for this high level scam. After all, what is paying $65 to evaluate your site to making $50,000 from its sale, you might think. But if you checked them out, you would see they are scammers. How can you check them out?

Using Whois

Go to whois.com, you will be able to discover who owns or registered any website, their address, when the site was registered, etc. Use whois.com to check out the owners of all the websites you have been directed to. You will discover that the scammer owns them all.

whois.com is a wonderful website you must use often if you do not trust a website, the information you get from whois.com can help you avoid falling victim of Internet scam. For instance, if a website is making claims of having been in business for 10 years, but when you checked its whois you saw it was registered just two years ago, that means you cannot trust that website because the owners lied. The wise thing to do is not to do business with it; else it could turn out to be scammers.

Looking Out For Closed Blogs Or Forums

As I mentioned above, in a bid to make you believe them, scammers might direct you to a set up blog post or forum where the comments there approve the company they want you to do business with. Such blogs or forums usually have few comments or posts, and you will not be able to add new ones. The reason they give for this is that they have closed comments on the posts because people have been scamming them. This is simply a lie, such blogs or forums are themselves scammers’ tools.

Exaggerated Earning Potential Or Claims

This is the hallmark of scams on the Internet. Scammers know that by promising you will make $750 or more a few hours a day on your pajamas with their program or system they will get your attention. So when you get such offers don’t rush to make payment for them, but check them out first. Check out their Whois and see if the information you get from it is consistent with what is on their website. Visit popular forums and inquire if anyone knows about them or have used their product or service before.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 5:42 am and is filed under Internet Marketing ideas & tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.