Avoid The Online Scams!

Scams, Scams and More Scams..

Sure, we all know there are plenty of them out there..

But what exactly defines a "Scam", and what are its characteristics?

A scam is essentially a confidence scheme designed to lure people in and take their money. Scams often draw people in by excessive success stories and promises of overnight success. In reality though many creators of scams are just self-proclaimed "gurus" trying to make a quick buck.

The following info will give you a brief outline on scams and potentially save you from feeding the cash-hungry "gurus" who don't care about you at all and only want your wallet's contents.

I've seen Pyramid Schemes, Email Marketing Schemes... you name it... on the Internet. There's no shortage of swindlers out there trying to make profits off of innocent and unknowing web users.

I'm going to endeavour to shed some light on what they are and how to identify and avoid them. I'll limit it to three points that could save you a lot of time and frustration. If an online program or product has one of more of these hallmarks, you should be highly dubious of it and think twice before entering your credit card details on the check-out page.

1. Do You Get a Free Trial Period?

Or at least some insight into the program, so that you can see exactly what you're purchasing. If the answer is "no", then the consequences aren't even worth thinking about.

I mean, when people are shopping in a department store for clothes or shoes, they generally want to try it on before going to the check out. The same principle applies in the online world. So remember to try before you buy. Next question!

2. Can You Contact the Owners?

How can you truly trust something online when you can't even contact the owners? Sure, you're not going to meet them in person (in most circumstances), but you should at least be able to contact them and be entitled to a timely response.

Most creators or owners are busy people, granted, but if they can't give you their time of day to reply to a simple message or email then I wouldn't give the product a second thought.

2. Does this Product Have Frequent Upsells?

A program, product or system should contain everything it claims to. If you purchase a new TV from you'd expect all the pieces and attachments to be there (with the exception of the antenna perhaps!).

Similar principle again, nothing should be lacking. And if you need to fill in several check-out pages just to get the full benefit from the program (don't be surprised to see that many have three or four upsells), then rest assured, you are dealing with a sub-par system. I have no problem putting this into the "Scam" category.

There is a lot more I could say on this topic, as well as other characteristics that constitute scams. These are the more obvious ones, and for the sake of brevity, I won't rattle on any more and will perhaps address these at a later stage.

Note: Originally I edited this post in Word as I often do and was going to post it to my website as a page. But I realised I already had a post on "Scams" which I wrote on my site four months ago. So I thought I'd share it here instead.. (even though it's a bit of a prescriptive and introductory blog) :)

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend everyone!

Thomas