The Dangers of Making Money Online

Let’s admit it: social interactions on the internet is not the same as in real life. You aren’t held accountable for things in the same way and people can’t see your face. Big companies try their best to dig into your pockets and time and get away unscathed. It leaves you angry and greatly discourages you from continuing to work on your goals. There are a few pointers I feel are necessary to share:

Read the Terms and Conditions! If the website doesn't have any, you shouldn’t go near it. I used to skim over the Terms and Conditions part until I realized that it’s used as a legal tool. For example, Agloco’s membership agreement reads:

"The amount of money that will be credited to your account for each hour of Active Surfing by You, or for the Active Surfing of Your Referrals or Extended Referrals (the "Hourly Rate(s)") may vary. You agree that AGLOCO™ may change (decrease or increase) any Hourly Rate at any time for any country or countries effective as of the posting of such new Hourly Rate(s) on the Global Payment Table.”

That basically gives Agloco the license to decrease the Hourly Rate to something which is completely worthless. If that were to happen, you might not have wasted money, but you wasted time. I don’t think Agloco is a scam, but I do think it is a rather sketchy business plan.

Don’t put your money down up front. Many schemes are designed to appear to be a real product when in fact they are luring you to join their business plan to recruit other members. This may be a pyramid scheme or something similar.

Don’t trust anything that a company claims about itself. Really, don’t. A company can rave about how great its customers are doing and how much they’re earning. The reality is that they can say that as long as it’s happened once before. For example, you will find any website which purports that you will get rich from their service has to put the following, somewhere on their site:

“Every effort has been made to accurately represent this product and its potential. Even though this industry is one of the few where one can write their own check in terms of earnings, there is no guarantee that you will earn any money using the techniques and ideas in these materials. Examples in these materials are not to be interpreted as a promise or guarantee of earnings. Earning potential is entirely dependent on the person using our product, ideas and techniques. We do not purport this as a "get rich scheme."”

Whatever their claims may be, you need to be aware this. You also need to be aware that what they really mean is that every effort has been made to accurately not get their asses sued. You need to come to face with the fact that it is a lot easier for scam artists to get away on the internet, and, due to these statements, virtually impossible for you to take them to court. Chances are you wouldn’t do such a thing anyways.

I had a chance to ask Mr. GPT a few questions about online scams, and he writes,

“Some advice I give to people looking to avoid scams is always check for payment proof. Sometimes the websites will contain a Payment Proof page, such as www.cashninjas.com. Other times, you may have to check their forums. Which brings me to my next point. Read up on the forums if they have one. Especially the "Support" section. Note what people are having problems with and how to avoid it.

”And last but not least, use Google to your advantage. Try typing in the site you're possibly going to join and add scam at the end. One of the well known scams, SurfJunky, still exists to this day. But by a simple Google search of SurfJunky scam, you can easily see that the program is a scam. Remember to read some of the links Google gives you as well. Just because one site says it's a scam doesn't mean it is. However, with SurfJunky, for example, you can easily tell the majority of the results say it is a scam.”

And now let’s look at a couple encouraging snippets out of Surf Junky’s Terms of Service:

“Surf Junky is currently in a beta testing phase. Members will be notified by email when Surf Junky is no longer in the beta phase of it's development. Any credit or commission earned during this beta testing time shall not be considered as payable income.”

And…

“Payments may be withheld by Surf Junky for any given reason for any period of time. Payment periods end on the last day of every month.”

It takes a lot less time to skim the Terms and Conditions than it does to figure out that it was a scam after all. The only reason I got tricked by this myself is because a blog I read recommended it. Clearly they hadn’t used it before.

The take-home message out of all of this is to realize that very few things are free. Those sites that are free tend to make it very difficult to accumulate money. If you want to make money online, realize that the only person who is going to protect you from scams like these is yourself.