From time to time different clients call me up to ask me about something that comes across their desk. Most of the time their gut instinct had it right, and they were looking at a scam.
Sometimes the scam is legal, just immoral – like charging $100 a year for a domain name when it can cost under $10. Or they are charging $200 for submitting your site to Google every month for a year, when in reality, you can do it yourself for free. By the way, over submitting to Google or the other search engines doesn’t help you and can actually hurt you as they see it as a form of spam.
Other times the scam is illegal. I don’t want to post too much just yet, as legal action might be taken, however I wanted to post a couple of links for helping you check out a scam.
www.ic3.gov/ – Internet Fraud Complaint Center
http://www.nethelp.org/scamhelp/ – list of common scams and types of scams
http://www.b4usplashcash.ocba.sa.gov.au/money/scams.html – from the Australian government
http://www.forexscams.org/ – foreign money exchange. This can take many forms, and a variation of this was attempted on my client.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html – from Craig’s List – a simple easy to follow guide
http://suckerswanted.blogspot.com/ – a list of scams and how to protect yourself
Luckily my client kept her head, realized some of the issues, and when she stepped back to look at the big picture, she saw it as the scam it was, before losing any money. (She did lose about 6 hours of time over a week – and time is money…)
Hopefully the links will be able to help other’s out.
If you know of any resources, please let me know as well.
About Walter Wimberly
Thank you so much, there aren’t enough posts on this… keep up the good work
Such bad people today, precisely why do some people really feel the need to do this?