Interested in a site or a program? Give them the test.
Do they want money up front for no products or real services? If yes let this be a red flag. Note that a website is not a product of any value when they give out the same design and wording a couple dozen times. The lack of original content is penalized by the search engines making it rather useless.
Are they offering unreal amounts of money? A $20,000.00 sign up bonus is not realistic. Another red flag if the amounts are not realistic.
Do you only make small amounts of money unless you upgrade your account? Another red flag.
Take their domain name to
http://www.dnstools.com check 'Do it all' and place the domain name in the entry box. Are they hiding their contact information behind a proxy service? When was the domain created? If they are claiming a large number of users, say like awsurveys.com claims 1,000,000 users, and they started on the 29th of December 2006. I find this unrealistic.
If they have made it this far you need to look at the contact information and see if they have something solid. Any information you get, telephone number or address, can be searched on any search engine. What other businesses are using, or have used, that same information? What types of businesses were they? Repeated money making opportunities using the same info should make you run.
Now, if you can find corporate information, a name and a state, you can go to that state's site and search for it, finding out how long it has been around and if it is in good standing. You can do this with various offshore corporations too using their national site to search. Offshore corporations are a bit more interesting though, since you have little or no legal recourse if the need arises. Use a search engine to see what other people are saying about a company.
If they say they are investing your money they have to be registered as a security company with the
SEC and if they are not, and claiming to be from the US, they are a scam. Even a group of little old ladies pooling their money to play the stocks or forex has got to be registered as an investment company.
Look at it as if you were on the Board of Directors for a huge corporation and so much money can be made doing this or that, or investing in some anonymous person's program on the net, why would a corporation with billions of dollars not be doing it? Beware of the cheerleaders of any so called program, since they are in it before you and only want to help scam you out of your money so they can get it.
Scam Testing Tools
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