The Ultimate How-To Protect From Scams And Fraud

As you can see in the guides about investing, making money from home, get paid to and living offshore there are plenty of opportunities to achieve financial freedom, work from home or live abroad and be happy. Indeed, the new economy and epsecially the Internet changed everything so drastically. Just 20 years ago most of these things would be impossible.

But the Web and the modern communications also introduced a lot of problems regarding security of your data, money and even life. The Web gave opportunity to many dishonest persons to steal personal data, create fraudulend schemes or just sell low quality products easy.

If you want to succeed and be financially free you need to know how to protect from the online scam and fraud. Otherwise all your efforts can be waisted.

Here are the most importand types of fraud you need to watch for:

Identity theft

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to you online is to have your identity stolen.When a malicous person obtain your personal information they could use it for illegal immigration, terrorism, espionage, getting loans on your name, blackmailing, ruining your business partnerships and many many more.

Identity theft usually happens when you give someone too much of your personal data. Online that happens through social networks, bogus job offers, stealing credit card and bank data, hacking databases, phishing mails and more. As you see the fraudsters have a lot of tools.

How to protect yourself? The best protection is to be very careful whom you trust, where and what data you are entering etc. Of course this is only basic and for more you may need the services of the companies providing quality identity theft protection. If you seriously plan to make living online, consider paying for such service.

Of course, we'll have a complete guide for identity theft protection on this site very soon.

Email Scam and Spam

If you have used email for at least an year chances are you have received from several hundreds to several thousands spam emails. Most of them will offer you cheap software, porn sites, submission to search engines and other services.

Most of this spam is not very dangerous except that if you are naive you could pay for some low quality service or products. But there is one category of very high risk email messages called "phishing emails". They can be efforts to steal your personal data (see identity theft above), to send you viruses, to steal your logins for Paypal or other payment processors, to get you involved in pump-and-dump schemes or simply to offer you some bogus business proposal.

The only way to protect yourself from such email scams is to use common sense and obtain knowledged about them. Expect also a complete guide for that of course.

Ponzi Scams

These scams were very popular the last several years. Fortunately they are kind of dying now, but there is still a big chance that you can get scammed by such if you are not careful. Most of the ponzi schemes are now advertised online as "HYIP" or private alternative investments.

You will recognize most of the ponzi scams easy - they offer too high return on investment, accept too low minimums (like $1 or $10), work with e-currencies like E-Gold or E-Bullion and are anonymous. However some ponzi scammers are very smart and register companies, work with bank wires and even produce fake proofs of trading or other business.

The only sure way to avoid ponzies is to never invest in a way that you don't legally control your money. Unfortunately that is not always possible so you may need to learn more about identitying ponzi scams. We'll have such guides here too.

Work At Home Scams

The web is full with "work at home" opportunities. Some of them promise you to make thousands weekly with easy jobs. Unfortunately most are scams. Many of these opportunities will require you to pay a signup fee to get inside. When you pay you either get nothing for it or just a list of outdated or low paying oportunities. Other work at home scams will get you work for free and never pay you.

Usually you can spot this fraud by seeding out the offers which seem too good to be true. Do you really believe someone will offer you more than an engineer's salary just to fill forms? It makes no sense. If you want to make good money from home, you need to be an expert or at least fairly good in something. Otherwise you can make from few hundreds to 2-3 thousands monthly at best.

Affiliate Marketing Scams

Affiliate marketing is very popular way of doing business, especially online. It's a system in which you can promote products of various merchants on your site or blog and when someone buys from your special link, you get paid a comission.

While there are thousands honest companies who give affiliate comissions to their referral partners, this business unfortunately is also full with scammers. The typical affiliate marketing scam simply does not pay the promised comissions. Very often these merchants are actually resellers of someone else and they want you to bring them clients for free so they can make money from some honest merchants. Such scammers usually rely on newbie affiliate marketers to work for them.

Another kind of scam is when you are offered very lucrative affiliate payments, but you are required to pay a membership fee first.

You can recognize affiliate marketing scams the lack of affiliate contact or website or no track record about them anywhere. These who ask you for upfront payment just to join their program are also all scams. When consider joining an affiliate program carefully examine the website and what the search engines know about the company who offers it.

Low Quality Products And Services

Legally being provided with low quality product or service is not a scam. But this doesn't help you feel better, because you have still lost your money in exchange for nothing.

Since it's easy to do business online, there are too many amateurs who offer products and service that they have no idea about.

To avoid giving your money to such "companies", learn to examine website's quality, to search reviews online and to communicate with the sellers before purchasing. The amateurs can often be told just by their style of communication.

It's always recommended to choose well known companies which offer money back guarantees, have contact details, exist for long time and offer live support.

Report Internet Fraud

If you discover a fraudulent website or service, report the scammers at Internet Crime Complaint Center and on the larger forum for internet scams.

Published at Dec, 31 '69 ; read 650 times;

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