The Lagoon TechMy little blog in Cyberspace.

Have you ever gone to a website that promised to show you how to strike it rich? Showed you how much money he is making in his PayPal account using his “special system”? Told you that he would show you how to do it yourself? Then once you are “in the system”, you quickly find out that most (if not all) of what he told you was hype?

That has happened to me before. People lying through their teeth, preying on unsuspecting people – many who probably do not have a lot of money.

I’ll give you some things to be cautious of when looking at services found online (e.g., like how to make money every day). Please note that just because a business falls into one or more of these categories, does not mean they are a scam. You will just have to use common sense.

1) Watch out for long, drawn-out webpages

If someone is advertising their product, and their webpage seems like it has no end what-so-ever (the page seems like a small book), then this is a very good sign that this service is a scam.

No one who is professional is going to go on and on taking up 30-45 minutes of your time to show you something that can be shown in 10 minutes or less.

2) Watch out for repetitive words

Scammers love to restate things over and over again. Like “you will make money in no time!”, “my special system…”, “this unique system…”, “…spend less time…”, etc.

If you get the same words, basic ideas, maybe even whole phrases repeated to you over and over again, mark it down that it looks like a scam.

3) Watch out for “testimonial” videos

Several scammers use “testimonial” videos to try to convince you that real people have tried out his service, system, whatever, and it actually works. Problem is, there is no way to know if these testimonials are in fact 100% true, and not just some actors being payed to say certain things for money.

4) Watch out for “No Cost” services

These scammers will typically try to get you to think that you do not have to spend ANY money with them to get these “services” or learn about his “system” of doing things.

Problem is, how does he make money if he does not charge anything? Something is wrong with that. Why would someone spend their time and money showing you how to make money (or whatever) and not get anything in return?

5) Watch out for “make money with Google Ad-sense” type of services

Google Ad-sense is a service from Google that allows webmasters to put Google ads on their websites. Basically if someone comes to your website and clicks on one (or more) of the Google Ad-sense ads, then you make a little bit of money. This really is not the way to make serious money online, but it can be a start for some people.

In my experience, every single “make money with Google Ad-sense” type of services I have come across has been a scam. No kidding! If the person wants to sell you Google Ad-sense “services”, be very cautious. There is a 99% chance that he is a scammer.

6) Watch out for “website building” scams

There are scammers that will promise to build you a website (for money) that will make you money. Well these “services” will more than likely turn out to be a scam.

I know because I had two people scam me before with this type of scam. A little over 6 years ago, I trusted two people to make me a website that would make money. Well I found out that these people were scammers (they built a one page website that made them money 😆). Thankfully PayPal gave the money back.

7) Watch out for web-hosting scams

A lot of people are duped by web-hosting companies telling them that they are getting unlimited disk-space and unlimited bandwidth. Folks, these hosting companies that advertise such things are lying to you (I should know, since I do web-hosting myself!)

Even the word “unmetered” (a term a few web-hosts use) while technically is different from “unlimited” is still riding on the edge as being dishonest.

Have you ever heard of an unlimited hard drive before?  How about unlimited bandwidth on an Internet router? Nope! No web-hosting company in the world can give anyone true, honest-to-goodness unlimited disk-space and bandwidth. It just will not happen.

It would be much better to find a host that does not offer any kind of unlimited hosting and has reasonable web-hosting packages available for purchase. Of course, that is your business whether or not you go with an unlimited web-host.

8) Watch out for “just run my software program, and it WILL make you money” type of scams

I have seen one such scam that if someone would use this “specially written” software, you will make money. I think you were to set it up a certain way and then “turn it on”, then it would make you money. I am sure everybody would like to have a money making solution like that. What a bunch of hogwash!

9) Watch out for “article website building software” (wow, that was a mouthful)

This type of scam is rare, but non-the-less real. I came across a software that built you a website full of articles at no cost.

Basically the idea is to have a bunch of unique content on the Internet for Google to index. Then when people find your article websites on Google, they have an opportunity to click on Google Ad-sense (or whatever money making ads you have) and make you money.

Well what the program was doing was taking other people’s articles (without their permission) and putting them onto your website (at least, the software put the name of the author for each article it copied). Google might ban your domain name if you put on duplicate content that was originally found on other websites. So much for unique content! 🙂

So basically there was a very small chance of making money (dishonestly), and you were risking Google banning your domain name that you used for the article website. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

10) Watch out for “I am tired of scammers too” sales pitches

I watched a video of this guy claiming that he was “tired of all the people who would scam you”. Basically he was trying to get people to believe that he was not a scammer. Well 2/3 into the video, it was real evident that he was promoting a “pyramid scheme” scam. So much for that.