Programs to Avoid (Details)

This page is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. The details of the 17 types of rip-offs are listed here. To see the index page click here.

1. Randomizers
First things first. These are illegal. PERIOD!

While there are a lot of scams on the Internet today that are illegal and that doesn't deter people from joining and promoting them, these can cause you more grief than they are worth. You could even lose your Paypal account if you get caught in one of these things (although a lot of them are going to different payment processors just because of that).

As with any "get rich quick" scheme these are flawed from the start.

This is how they work (or don't work to be more accurate). You join, usually from someone's link who is promoting it. You'll pay anywhere from $5 to $20 to join. When you do, a portion of your payment is given to the person who’s link you used, some goes to the site operator, and the rest gets paid to a random member of the program.

Now it may look like the site operator is getting such a small amount that he can't be in it for the money, but see how many members there are and multiply that by the site operator's "small" take. So say there are 5000 members on a particular site.

Say the site operator gets $2 per signup. Now you join for $20. Of this, $8 goes to the person that had the link you used, $2 goes to the site operator, and $10 goes to a random person in the program. Now say the very next day you got lucky and you received a $10 random payment.

Wow, you have received half of your money back in one day! At this rate you'll be rich in no time right? Wrong! Now you have to wait for 5,000 more people to sign up before you get your next $10! And to make matters worse, once you get the second payment, meaning another 5,000 people for a total of 10,000 now in the program, you have to wait until they are all paid before you get the next $10! Then it's 20,000, then 40,000, then 80,000, then 160,000.... I'm sure you catch my drift.

Even if the payments were totally random it wouldn't be any better than playing the lottery.

Now you can go out and try to make your money by getting people to sign up under you but if you've never tried, let me save you some time. If you promote heavily even using free advertising methods it would probably take you a month to get 5 signups. That's $40. Figure minimum 30 minutes a day for the 20 working days in the month. You just made yourself around $4 an hour and only got to work 10 hours in the whole month! So you say you can work more hours? You can, but it's been my experience that you will start to see a curve of diminishing returns. You'll work more and more for less and less return on your time.

I don't know about you, but I would rather spend my time working a real program that has the potential of making at least a couple hundred dollars a day working that same 30 minutes to an hour a day. 

Like the ones I recommend here.

Do yourself a favor and do not even consider these Randomizers, not only are they illegal, they are a total waste of time, energy, and money. Google is your friend... do a quick search for randomizer scam like I just did and it returned 120,000 hits.

Read a couple then do another search for randomizer illegal and you come up with another 36,000. I'll save you the bother... you don't even have to read any of the pages, these things are illegal, period!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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2. Freelance Writing
This used to be advertised much more as a way to work from home but it has lost favor lately. Probably because people have finally caught on. Or more likely it was hard to make it sound easy so it was a bit harder to sell than most scams. Either way, it's still not completely gone (though I wish it was), so I thought I'd mention it here for those that haven't tried this one. 

Unlike some of the other scams I list here, this is a real job opportunity and can pay fairly well, but you will never get rich off of it. This is more like a real job, and like a real job you normally have to apply and be accepted. This means you will have to have not only experience in writing (I'd never qualify if you haven't noticed already:)), and you are expected to be somewhat of an expert in the field or fields that you would be writing about. This would include a resume with prior works and/or references.

But like I said, this is a legitimate job and does offer the flexibility of working from home and choosing your own hours. Just don't expect to be working full time and don't expect to make more than about $10 per hour when you can find work.

So why is this even on this scam page? Here's why. There are companies/people out there that will actually charge you to give you instructions on how to go about landing one of these "dream" jobs. They'll even give you listings of companies that purchase articles and short stories. This will cost you anywhere from $29-$197.

In reality, they have given you nothing you couldn't have discovered yourself with one little Google Search for "Freelance Writers wanted". I just did that search and came up with 44,700 links to sites that matched on the exact phrase. If I take the quotes off (fuzzy search), I get 3,920,000.

I really don't think you need to pay someone to send you a list of companies looking for freelance writers. Don't do it! If you need a list that badly and you can't seem to figure out how Google works, send $20 to my Paypal account and I'd be happy to send you a list! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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3. Paid-to-Read E-mails
These are probably the worst programs out there right now and have been for quite some time. I think it's the simplicity of the system that makes it so appealing and why they have survived for so long. I mean think about it... "all I have to do is read e-mails and I can make a decent living from home?".

Wow! I can read e-mails!

Reality check.

While these companies say that you can receive up to $500 per email, they are lying! How quickly do you think a company advertising via e-mail would go out of business if they paid $500 for each e-mail that was read by someone? This is probably the biggest scam on the Internet today.

But before I go too far let me say that there are some legitimate companies out there that actually will pay you to read e-mails (and click on the links contained in them to view a website). But they pay nowhere near even a dollar per e-mail. Most are in the sub-penny to three cent area. Now that would be fine I guess in that if you were very efficient with your time you could probably get through 6 e-mails a minute or so (viewing the web page 10 seconds per e-mail). But the problem is they only send you between  10 and 50 e-mails a day.

So let's do the math and let's take the best case scenario (50 e-mails @ .03 per). Let's figure 30 days in the month, so.... 30X50X.03= a whopping $45 per month! WOW! I'm rich! :) And this is the very best case scenario. You actual results would probably be more like $5 to $15 per month.

Just say no to these obvious scams. And especially so if they want some money up front to set up and maintain your account. If you see an ad for one of these and I'll positive you will since they just won't go away, do me and yourself a favor and run away as fast as you can!

 For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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4. Paid Survey Sites
Since these are related to the Paid-to-Read email type scams I thought I'd keep these together. Instead of getting paid to read e-mails, you get paid to take online surveys.

In a nutshell this is how they work. You register with the company. This can either be free but most likely at a cost, some as high as $70. The company then send you links to take online surveys.

As with the Paid-to-Read e-mail scams, they promise very high pay for simple surveys. They are lying just like the Paid-to-Read e-mail companies. First, you have to qualify to be able to take the surveys. Qualification is hard. Sometimes you have to be in a very small group. Think about it as a business owner that wants a survey for market study, if it was easy to find people to take your survey why on earth wouldn't you just set up the survey yourself rather than farm it out to these guys?

You could put a survey up on your site or those sites that you do business with and even offer and incentive, like coupons, free merchandise, or gift certificates, to get people to participate.

No, they hire these guys to get people like you to take the surveys because they are looking for particular people to take these surveys and those people are hard to find.

But wait... even if you do qualify what happened to the large cash pay-outs for these surveys? You get excited that you have qualified for a survey only to find out that this particular survey only pays ten cents (about the average in my experience). So you'll have to take a hundred surveys to get $10.

Figure the average time to take the survey at 10 minutes and you are making a whopping $0.60 an hour! Wow! I say no thanks and you should too! The only reason that these are still around is that people (like me) still fall for this scam for the same reasons they fall for the Paid-to-Read e-mail scam, it sounds just to easy! 

These guys make their money up front with your account setup fee and they do real well by the way. I'm sure you've seen these, and, by the way, the reason you see these all the time is because they usually have pretty good affiliate programs.

This means you can sign up as an affiliate and make money by getting other people to fall for this scam. Some people make a good living just of the affiliate programs on these things.

Do me a favor, don't fall for these, and whatever you do, don't even think about promoting them. That would make you no better than them and karma will catch up with you! You have been warned! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

5. Mystery Shopper
Notice a trend here? Yes, items 3-6 in my list all have something in common. They just sound so down right easy!

After all you can do any of these things right? Anyone can! And the fact that they say they are going to pay you insane amounts of money to do something anyone can do should give you a clue that they might not be on the level.

Ok, on to the infamous Mystery Shopper scam. This is not really an internet scam because I've seen it advertised in the back of magazines and newspapers but I included it here because I've seen it also advertised more and more on the Internet lately.

Beware! 99% of these are scams! It's so easy today to set up a website and promote anything you want. I could easily set one up to promote a mystery shopper membership site in as little as an afternoon. I could bid on some Google Adwords to drive some targeted traffic to it overnight and I could charge $25-$69 to supply my new "customers" with a list of outdated and non-existent businesses that pay for them to shop. 

Then when I've gotten so many complaints that I just can't live with myself anymore I'd take the site down (notice I didn't mention anything about refunding any signup fees) and create another one under a different domain name tomorrow and start all over again. This is the way that 99% of these things work!

There are a few companies out there that really do provide this service and it can be fun but not exactly lucrative. For one thing, if you are in a small town, chances are you're not going to get an assignment anywhere nearby. This means travel expenses. A lot of times you are paid in merchandise, or in the case of restaurants you get your meal paid for and nothing else. Then you are expected to report back on your experience.

If you are in a large city you may think there are a lot more assignments. You are correct! But there are also  lot more people doing it so you may go a month at a time before getting an assignment. If you really want to pursue this one, because I have to admit, it can be fun, you need to be super careful about the company you select. 

I have only found three companies (although I'm sure there are a few more) that I would even consider recommending and I'll list them here. I'm even hesitant about recommending these because there are better ways to make money on the internet. But for those of you that find doing business on the internet too complicated even after checking out what the Internet marketing Center has to offer, these might be for you. 

Shopping Jobs

Shop Until You Drop

Get Paid 2

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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6. Paid Typing Programs
Now you may think that these programs send you some kind of audio or something along that line and want you to transcribe it to typed format. Or you may think that these programs are some kind of data entry position.

Wrong.

These are nothing but scams that tell you to post ads and get paid for the responses to those ads. They charge you anywhere from $25-$70 to get set up and guess what? They already have your money so from then on you're pretty much at their mercy (and they have none).

Problem is that they are very restrictive on where you place the ads and the ads have to be "approved" by the company as well. Just how many ads do you think get approved?

They have found tons of ways to get out of paying for your work and if you make a buck a day for 8 hours work I'd be very surprised and would really like to hear about it! Just stay away from these things. I have not found one (out of the 50 or so I've looked at) that is legit!

The fact that they advertise this as a type from home program and not an ad placing program should tell you to pass on these. Anytime a program misrepresents itself or makes a list a mile long of what it *isn't* without telling you exactly what it is, just turn around and run, don't walk, away!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

7. Paypal (and all other) Chain Letters 

DO NOT EVEN ATTEMPT THESE!!

DO NOT GET INVOLVED!!

DO NOT SEND ANY OUT!!

These things have been around forever and have been illegal for just as long.

Do not believe them when they say they are from a lawyer or that a lawyer has looked at it and it's completely legal.

They are lying!!!

Some even go so far as to quote the US Postal and lottery regulations stating that you can read them for yourself to see that it's legal. Of course no one who joins one of these things does that. If you did read the regulations carefully you would immediately realize that the laws were written specifically for these types of scams!

Don't even believe the ones that say you'll be buying a service or product which makes them legal. This is usually a one page report that each person in the list sends out depending on where they are in the order of the list.

This is BULL!

They are still illegal! I actually got into one of these believing what they said about it being legal. This is before the Internet and I went out and bought stamps and envelopes and paid to have the letters copied and sent them out only to have my local postmaster knock on my door.

I didn't get into any real trouble but I also didn't make any money and was out the nearly $300 I spent in postage, envelopes, and copying fees. They look great but they do not work and you stand a good chance of getting in serious trouble with the FBI, not to mention you will lose your PayPal account. PASS ON THESE!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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8. Data Entry
This is another of those "just won't go away" scams. This, along with the "Paid to Type" programs are probably the most popular falsely advertised programs on the Internet.

It sounds like you'll be just entering data from forms into boxes on a webpage or something. This is not a job like that. This is where they instruct you on how to place ads on the internet promoting affiliate programs.

They pitch it as data entry because that sounds easier to do. Don't fall for these... they won't tell you what it really is until *after* they have your money! Oh sure they tell you what's it's not though.

Here's something to remember when searching for an internet money-making opportunity, in the pitch, if the list of what it isn't is longer than the list of what it is, RUN AWAY!!!!!! That's the oldest trick in the book.

If they really had valuable information they would tell you what it was before you buy it!

I'm not saying they have to give you their secrets... I'm just saying you should know at least how it works and what t really is from the sales copy. If not, don't buy it!!!

Enough said! You'll notice that all of the programs I recommend tell you what they are and what they are about before you buy. That is one of my requirements when recommending a program. I have never found a legit program that only tells you what it isn't!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

9. $100,000 in Four Months or Pay Nothing
This is another one of those "to good to be true" opportunities that should tell you right off the bat if it's to good to be true, it usually is!

The deal here is they promote your program and if you don’t' make $100,000 in four months they won't charge you their $15,000 fee.

Sounds great right?

I mean what if they only made you $40,000? You'd still be $10,000 a month ahead and you wouldn't have to pay the 15k! 

Problem is they know they can't make $100,000 promoting your program or product. They know they'll never collect your 15k. So how do they stay in business?

They also have a "setup" fee which is non-refundable. They already have your money and they couldn't care less if they drive any sales at all for you!

Think about this.... if they could take *any* program and make $100,000 from it in four months why wouldn't they do that instead of just getting $15,000 from you?

You may say... well they can get the $15,000 from several people and then can make over $100,000 by promoting several people programs. Really? Why wouldn't they just promote those same programs themselves and make $100,000 on each one???

Think about it... and stay away from programs like these!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

10. Get A Site Just Like This One
If you've been looking into marketing online I'm sure you've seen lot's a variations on these.

Some have affiliate products for sale (with your affiliate links embedded in the page), others are just for Adsense revenue (which Google is going to crack down on soon!), and still others have a combination of the two.

Some are even going so far as to offer niche products. I can't say that all of these operators are crooks but the majority are. Most are there just so you can get other people to buy the same site from you! And then say one of the people that you sold one of these things to actually did some heavy promotion and got a couple sales from it. You wouldn't get anything for it.

At least if they were set up more like an affiliate program you *might* be able to make a little money if you can get enough people to buy their site from you. But it's highly doubtful that anyone that buys the site from you will do anything with it anyway.

There are better ways to make money on the internet. The only thing I could recommend these things for is to test your own idea of having a website devoted to selling affiliate programs and generating adsense revenue.

You'll see quickly how hard this actually is! My advice... steer clear... your promotional resources are better spent other places.

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

11. Retail Sales
There are tons of real products you can find to sell on the Internet. Books, meat, perfumes, health aids, weight loss products, and practically anything else you can think of. 

These are ALL legitimate products. But unless you are a savvy salesman with lot's of experience selling products over the internet you are not very likely to generate the kinds of sales it takes to be successful. The other problem is you have to inventory product, ship, handle returns and customer complaints (even with products you’re proud to sell there are always some people that just can't be satisfied).

If you can find a company that will drop ship the product for you it would be much better. But you still have to know how to market on the internet to be successful at this.

If you truly want to pursue this opportunity be sure to pick up and excellent internet marketing course like I have available here. It will save you tons of money and time in the long run and will all but guarantee your success if you stick with it!

You're probably wondering why I even listed retail sales here. It's because most companies out there selling this kind of opportunity are not very good about helping you succeed. They don’t give you the tools or the training to become successful.

There are exceptions but be sure to talk with a successful distributor (one that will not benefit from you joining) and ask them to be truthful with you. Most people, if asked nicely to be truthful, will.

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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12. Doublers, Triplers, etc.
The vast majority of these are illegal! But there are always exceptions to the rule.

Some will offer a product or service to get around the legal loopholes but this still doesn't make them a solid business opportunity.

The problem is that these things, even if they are borderline legal, are impossible to sustain.

Let me give you an example. You sign up and deposit some money. It varies by company but there's usually an upper limit and sometimes a lower one but it's normally not more than $10.

Then they guarantee that you will double or triple that amount in a certain amount of time. This also varies but is usually in the 1-3 month range.

Be extremely careful of the ones that say they'll double in less than a month. So you put in $100 and in three months you get back $200! Great right?

So where the problem??? Here it is. They have to continue to get new people in faster than those already scheduled to get payments. Where else is the money coming from?

Some say they are trading Forex (Foreign Currency Exchanges) but no one makes that kind of money even in the lucrative field of Forex. So no... sadly the majority of the money comes from new deposits.

When the payouts are bigger than the new deposits these things fold faster than you can imagine (overnight). And the money that is left in the program usually goes with the operators! Please just stay away from these and don't get burned.

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

13. Traffic Generation/Advertising Sites
Now I'm not talking about traffic exchanges and such here. I love traffic exchanges and safelists! I know there are many out there that would argue about the effectiveness of these things but I’ve had excellent results with them and I go with what works!

Back to the subject. :) What I'm talking about here is programs that are usually very expensive in the $1000-$1500 range. And they usually offer a big commission (upwards of 66%) to promote their program. But with all the other programs out there in the same price range it's a very hard sell.

For that matter, most people just getting into online marketing are pressed for cash as it is and can not afford to shell out that kind of money on something that isn't a sure thing.

Experienced online markets have no use for these things so your customer base is nearly non-existent to start with. But guess what? The person that referred you has already got their 66% and the company just got another 33% so they don't care! There are better ways to make an honest living on the internet so stay away from these!

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

14. HYIP (high yield investment programs)
They are also sometimes called auto-surf programs just to get away from the bad name HYIP is starting to generate.

These things are HIGHLY illegal!!!

Don't even consider putting ANY money into these!!!

If you really have that kind of money to waste please just send me an email telling me how much you want to give me and at least you'll get a thank you from me! These guys take your money without so much as a thank you!

I'm not going to waste any more time on these... if you want to know more do a Google search for "12 Daily Pro FBI" and do a little reading on your own. You can thank me for this one later! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

15. Free To Join (or any free e-book type offerings)
I'm a little hesitant to mention these here because there are some very legitimate free-to-join programs and some free e-books that have true value. I even promote some of these myself. But there are also enough scams out there using these methods that I have to at least try to let you know how you can tell the difference between the good and the bad.

There are at least two types of the ones to watch out for.

The first is the kind that you are free to join and you can make money on those that you refer *but only* if they upgrade to a paid plan. I'll tell you right now that no one upgrades to the paid plan. I mean, if you don't, why on earth would you think anyone else would? And even if you do what makes you expect anyone else is going to?

I'm not saying you can't make any money in these things, I'm just saying even if you do make a little money it's not even going to be enough to make it worth the time to drive traffic to your signup page. There are other programs that generate better results.

The other kind to watch out for are the ones that will give you a site for free with all your affiliate links in it. But if you look closely you'll notice that not all of the links on the page point to your affiliate partners.

For one thing it would be awfully expensive to belong to all the programs that are normally listed on these kinds of pages. So what happens is the guy that put the program together puts his links on "your" page where ever you haven't supplied an affiliate links for him to put in it for you. See where this is going?

Now you promote the hell out of this page and he gets free hits on his links which are on every "free" website that he has "given" away! Not only that... but if you do decide to join more of the programs so you can get more of the revenue from advertising your page... he'll have a spot where you can conveniently sign up! I wonder why? :) You'll be signing up under him which makes him even more money!

Now there's nothing wrong with this... it's actually nearly genius in a way. But I've had a couple of these and have never got one signup or sold an affiliate product once! This is after I had driven tons of traffic to "my" sites. 

To top it off you should know that these websites aren't put together custom for everyone that has one. They are database driven, meaning they all look the same and everything is done automatically!

You do all the work of setting up your own website (except for the initial creation of the original template website). When you enter your information and affiliate links it is all put into a database and then when you send someone to that page with your id attached to the web address (URL) the information you entered is retrieved from the database and the page gets built on the fly with your information and links on the page except of course for all the links that still belong to the owner of the program because you didn't belong to all the programs offered.

If you really want to make money with these kinds of websites start one yourself! I have extensive database back-end web programming experience and I'd be happy to help you put one together if that's what you want to do! :)

Do be extremely careful with free-to-join programs in general. You can waste a lot of resources and time on these and have nothing to show for it in the end.

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Click here to go back to the Scams Index

16. Membership sites
As with the free-to-join programs, membership sites are a mixed bag of very few legitimate sites along with a ton of sites that are designed to do nothing but collect your money each and every month.

The worst ones are nearly impossible to cancel sometimes taking 3-4 months before they finally stop charging your credit card or stop debiting your bank account.

The legitimate sites are usually easy to spot. They will tell you exactly what they are and how they work before you even have to sign up. If a membership site has true value they will retain their membership base because of the fact that their members are getting something for their membership fee and will want to continue to do so.

Many (only the best) will offer a free one month trial so you can see the benefit of being a member before you have to spend a cent. Most of the good ones are also very reasonable in the 10-30 dollar a month range. Some will offer services that are more than worth the monthly fee such as free autoresponders, redirect services (link stealthing), ad trackers, and sometimes even web hosting and other services.

I belong to one such program now and it supplies me with just about everything I need to run my various online businesses. Plus the training is top-notch especially for those that are new to online marketing. Even as long as I've been in this business I have learned a couple things from their training materials. It's called Trafficwave and they have been around for a long time and are doing it very well. If you'd like to take a free trial for a month, check it out by clicking here, you won't be sorry.

There are a few legitimate membership sites that don't offer these things but can still be of great value. One in particular that I belonged to 3-4 years ago did nothing but document everything the site operator was doing to make money online. He'd start a new campaign every week and go into great detail of how he put it together, how he promoted it, and what the results were so far. This was very valuable information at $9.99 a month!

He would actually list the forms of advertisement he used along with the results from that advertising! This included bulk and solo ads in newsletters, banners (pay-per-click wasn't around yet), emails to various lists, and  other forms of traffic generation. This information alone saved me lots of money per month! Much more than the reasonable monthly membership fee.

Now on to the ones that you definitely need to watch out for. I have also belonged to some membership sites that were not very good. One I signed up for in early 2006 was one of the biggest scams I have ever seen. It had a monthly membership fee of $47 with a OTO (one time offer) that told you in order to make big bucks you needed to upgrade right away to the $97 monthly fee.

The sales material was so good that even I in my jaded and suspicious frame of mind bought into it hook like and sinker. To top it off they only showed you a months worth of their so-called "training" at a time because, according to them" they didn't want to overwhelm you. Bull Sh*t! All they wanted you to do was to promote the same program to other unsuspecting opportunity seekers and they would pretty much split the monthly fees with you!

I stuck with it for three months because the training material always just kept you guessing what was coming the next month only to find out that guessing is all you'd be doing. So after three months I went to cancel my membership (something that was guaranteed to be easy) only to find out that there was nowhere on the site to contact anyone.

So I did what I thought was the next best thing, I tried to get it cancelled through the payment processor they were using and thought (after a month of going back and forth with them) that I was finally out from under this terrible program. Until the next month rolled around and I found another change on my credit card!

I contacted them again and was told that all I did was cancel my membership on the site, if I wanted them to stop charging me I'd have to get a hold of the site operator. I explained that I couldn't find that information on the site and since now they had cancelled my membership I couldn't even log onto the site to look again! They gave me a web address where I could submit a support ticket which I did.

After two more months of back and forth BS I finally was not being charged anymore. I asked for a refund for the two months that I couldn't even access the site but was informed that I wasn't qualified for a refund! Is that crazy or what????

Be very careful when signing up for membership sites. I wasn't going to mention any names but this one needs to be exposed because I'm not the only one hurt by them.... well, I guess I probably shouldn't list the name here because he really isn't doing anything illegal but I will tell you that the push is that you can make $1057.50 for practically doing nothing. And on the sales page there is a bank statement showing and incredible $114,186.33 for a month's worth of sales!

Unbelievable? Of course it is... unless it's his bank statement for duping in unsuspecting people like me! :) Then it goes on to say "Would $114,183.33 a month do the trick for you?" Of course it would! But you're not going to get it here! Oh and before I forget.... right at the top of the page it says this is a very limited time offer... sure... I signed up in early 2006 and as I write this it is Late November and the offer is still floating around out there.... I wonder what he means by limited time offer??? Never buy anything online from someone who is misleading in their sales page.

One other thing... if you read the entire page you'll notice a section devoted to What this program is not! RED FLAG!!!!! But like I said... this sales copy is so enticing and written so well that even I had to know what this one was all about. Now I do... and now you do too.... but it didn't cost you nearly $600 to find out did it? :)

If you do run into a membership site that you are interested in, email the operator and ask for a free month to see if the site is a good fit for you. If the site has value and the operator is honest he will gladly work out some kind of arrangement for you to preview the site.

If nothing else he will at least give a detailed description of what the site has to offer and let you make up your mind from there. Plus you'll know how to contact the guy/company and request a cancellation if you no longer want to be a member. You can get a great feel for who you're dealing with after a couple personal emails. If he/she/they don't have time to answer your emails then I'd move on to the next opportunity.

Like I said before, I belong to Trafficwave and I find it very valuable for the reasonable monthly fee. And anytime I want or need to ask a question they are right there for me. Highly recommended! Click here to check it out.

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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17. Government Grants and Giveaways
I have not ran into one of these things that aren't at least semi-shady. For one thing, if you really want a government grant the information is all over the internet and is free!!! Get off your lazy butt and type "government grant" into Google and see what you find (ignoring all the programs I'm talking about here of course).

These companies make it sound so easy to get a grant that you're expecting to pocket $25,000 in the next month! Believe me when I tell you it's not that easy. I wrote government grant proposals for a company I worked for and it takes time and qualifications to get them. It's true, the government does give away tons of money a year, but it's also true that your chances of getting any of it are pretty slim unless you have something they want!

I wanted to warn my readers of such programs and bought a package a few years ago. It was crap. Using the material they sent (just two small booklets) there was no way someone inexperienced with grants could get one. One booklet was devoted to showing you how to apply and the other just listed sources for government grants all of which is information easily obtained online. So there was $29.95 I could have just as easily went out to dinner on and still knew as much as I did before I got them.

But always wanting to believe in the best in people, I was offered a "free" CD on a website a while back that tells you that you can get government grants easily (just like always right?) and that you only have to pay the shipping on the CD to get it for "free".

So I did, and while most people won't bother to read the fine print on the order page I did. Guess what? By entering you credit card/bank account information you are agreeing to a membership on their site to the tune of ~$30 bucks a month! But I figured that I was going to cancel anyway before I ever got charged the $30 so I went ahead and filled out the form. I had 2 weeks to cancel so no problem right?

Well I'm a busy guy and pretty much forgot about the whole thing until I finally received the CD three weeks later! So I had already been charged! Then I reviewed the CD and the website so I could post this information and guess what? This CD looked exactly like a rehash of the two booklets I purchased years ago! I'm serious.... I still had the booklets in my library (I never throw anything away) and some of the information was exactly the same word-for-word! Some had been updated and there was a little more new information but for the most part all they did was recreate those booklets in an online form and continued ripping people off! They even show their "helpful" staff in a group picture. These are the people that will help you obtain your grant.

Guess what again? It ain't going to happen unless you qualify. And the worst part... as of this writing I'm still signed up with them because in order to cancel you have to call their (non toll free) office so someone can try to hard-sell you staying with the program.

I promise I will call them first thing in the morning to cancel! If they give me a hard time I'll post it below. :) For now... if you really think you qualify for a government grant, start by searching Google and do your homework. Not only will it improve your chances of getting a grant (you'll probably know more about it in a week than they know now), you'll be much better equipped to answer the questions the grantee will have for you.

 For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

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