Defeating Scams Through Common Sense

A friend on MyLot made a comment that reminded me I had been planning on making this post... so here it is.

It's true that there are a lot of scams out there, and therefore I wanted to post some tips to help you guys detect a scam before wasting your time on it. To be sure, nothing here is fool proof, but knowing which offers are more likely to be scams can save you a lot of time. If anyone has anything to ad, feel free to comment, e-mail or contact me on twitter and I'll add them to this list.

The site might be a scam if:
1. You have to pay to get paid. There are countless sites out there that want you to pay for membership or a one time starter fee. There are others that will make you pay for "training" and will claim to have a low price for a limited time (though somehow this limited time seems to be endless). Bottom line - if you have to pay to make money, you most likely will never see that money again. You're better off trying the free sites. If they turn out to be scams, you've lost a bit of time, but you haven't lost any money.

2. The site claims you can make hundreds of dollars a day. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Getting money from paid-to-anything sites can be a slow process, and most sites have a minimum payout requirement. If the minimum payout is over $50 (I generally say $30 to be safe), it's likely the site is making a lot of money from advertisers and not having to pay their members, simply because there aren't that many people reaching that minimum.

3. Other people say it's a scam. I don't go crazy with research when I find a new site, but I will check on forums to see if anyone else has experience with it. I also generally go to google and search "[site name] scam" to see if anything comes up. If you do google searches like I do, make sure you actually read the articles that come up. Some people will say a site is a scam, when others say the same site is legit and has paid them. This is usually just because the first person didn't put enough time into it, or didn't read the rules and got booted for some reason (and then got angry and complained in their blog). Read over whatever you find and make your own educated decision. This is another area where sites like myLot can help. Because it's a paid-to-post site, a lot of people on there are looking for the same oportunites you are. So many of them will have heard of and/or tried out whatever site you're looking at, and can therefore give you their opinion on it.

4. The "testimonials" sound fake. There are now programs out that will make fake testimonials for you, because people have figured out how valuable testimonials are to their business. Sites like PrizeRebel (sorry, it's my favourite, if you haven't guessed) have realistic, believeable testimonials... many others have crazy, over the top success stories. Again, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I'm sure I'll come up with more later, but these are the main ones.