Posts Tagged ‘scam’

Having stumbled on a business card promoting the TVI scheme recently and having previously been asked by a friend to check out its credibility I thought I should warn people…

What claims do they make?

• they claim it’s a legitimate travel business
• that you can make $10,000 a week from recruiting others

What is it in reality?

It’s a classic pyramid sales scam, (A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, without any product or service being delivered. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud – Wikipedia)

• the ‘ business’ consists only of recruiting others
• has been banned by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, with no doubt more to follow and their offices in London have been vacated and moved to India

Please be on your guard. I know times are hard for many, which makes it a perfect time for the unscrupulous to prey on hopes and dreams. Make no doubt these people will take your last penny off you. Don’t buy dreams – if it looks to good to be true, it probably is. We all know that – but sometimes even good people get caught out when times are tough.

If you know me, or if you’ve read much of this site you’ll know that I have have an intense distaste for ‘get rich quick’ schemes and all those morons out there trying to pitch themselves as an ‘Internet Guru’ with little or no knowledge of the Internet or indeed business of any kind (or often with failed business careers behind them).

This is NOT my car - much as I wish it was!

There are a few people out there doing ‘make money from blogging’ thing really well and with a genuine desire to help others. And for each one of them there are a million imitators cutting and pasting their content, who are quite prepared to lie and cheat you out of your money for bogus ‘courses’ promising to mentor you into making millions just like them – they haven’t made millions yet, you are their best hope. Their sites are illustrated with pictures of Ferraris, big houses and screens shots of massive Google Adsense or Clickbank payment screens (the names always blocked out in an attempt to make you believe it’s actually theirs – trust me its not).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always amazed at how many people get sucked into Internet scams. There are so many of these scam ‘companies’ its unbelievable. I can only assume that there are enough vulnerable, willing newbies, still with notions that the Internet is the only place you can make easy money to fall into their traps.

Someone I know who had signed up  – and was dumb enough to think that because I knew about about the Internet I would be amazed (as often happens) – rather than see through the bullshit, introduced me to this a while back.

I haven’t laughing since, it’s called Smart Money Websites. It’s hilarious, and in the usual style of these thing full of absurd claims and stupid testimonials like this…

“I absolutely LOVE Smart Money Websites. For the first time in my life I’ve been able to do my own websites, squeeze pages, record audio, split test, Oh my gosh it’s all so easy….”

This ‘business’ was started by a “Wayne van Dyke” who claims to be a venture capitalist, supposedly involved with highly profitable technology start ups.

Problems…

1. A search on Wayne van Dyke leads only to stories about Dick van Dyke thus burying him if it is his real identity in Google (I doubt this is an accident so you don’t find the truth!).

2. If he’s so damned smart why doesn’t he name his past successes.

In the usual hard sell direct style, the text of this ’site’ if you can call it that, has lots of numbers ($50,000 is the favourite), and lots of buttons to suck you into the $1 trail.

So, what are they selling. Well,  it’s not really clear. It’s either a pyramid scheme, or they are selling pre-build affiliate marketing site. Who cares what they are selling. They prey on the ill informed.

Here’s some numbers for you – apparently this is the yearly cost of a website.

How to make your first $50K (home study course) – $297

(Reality: Chances are completely worthless if their site is anything to go by as they don’t know what they are doing!)

Hosting – $240

(Reality: $83.40 if you use someone like Hostmonster)

Site Builder – $250

(Reality: FREE, assuming they mean a basic site building package as is often bundled with hosting accounts or free to download, but they are not clear)

Email Autoresponder – $200

(Reality: FREE with any sensible hosting plan)

Split Testing – $249

(Reality: FREE, but, creating similar gateway pages runs the risk of getting you banned from Google)

Squeeze Page Generator – $480

(Reality: FREE, but, again considered as spam by search engines – follow the  link to see why you should not use them)

Ad-Tracking – $199

(Reality: FREE)

Webstats – $348

(Reality: FREE with any sensible hosting plan, or you can use a service like StatCounter)

Audio – $348

(Reality: FREE, they simply don’t know what they are talking about)

Dashboard – $1200

(Reality : FREE, probably little more than a host’s control panel or an Admin panel within a custom site which would have been purchased with the build)

Webmaster @$50/hr. x 400 hrs – $20,000

(This is my favourite, the sites I build for people don’t often take more than a few hours – if any – to look after)

Here’s the good news, you only get to pay them $647 a year for all this! The only thing missing from this to truly convince me that this was a scam was a photo of the founder on a Hawaiian beach with a cocktail in hand next to a big boat or Lamborghini  just to show how they are enjoying spending your money!

I did send them a polite (okay, polite is stretching the truth a bit) email to ask what they were ACTUALLY selling, but needless to say never got a response…

Yes - it does look a bit like me...

You know – up to now I don’t know. But to give  anyone reading this some background – as I’ve said elsewhere I am a web designer. I’m also a web designer that believes in practising what I preach, so my wife and I also run an ever expanding portfolio of  sites and blogs which make revenue mostly through paid for advertising and Google adsense. As well as blogs under our own names. We’re big fish in a little pond if you like.

So why this blog? I got a bit pissed lately after a former ‘friend’ picked our brains and then headed off to imitate our work – and in one particularly galling instance approaching a client, try to sell to them – whilst also duplicating content from one of our sites. He now has three blogs – in one of which he portrays himself as an Internet/blogging guru – quite absurd given that he started last Xmas and is doing the usual ‘I want to be a professional blogger’ thing of copying the ‘10 ways to blog’ post and the like, rewording it and claiming to be authoritative… Also claiming that this blog actually is now his main living – do the sums – it must be bullshit – or at best a gross exageration of the truth.

Okay, so I couldn’t give a damn about him personally – but I do care about his site and sites like it that…

1. Tell lies, most people who make these claims are probably only making a few bucks on the side – if that
2. Decieve, where these people try and sell you stuff of little value, like stupid reports on how to get rich overnight
3. Infest the Internet, I can’t stand just how many of these ‘get rich bloggin’ blogs there are with all the same crap on them
4. Create spam, and never let go of any email address they acquire
5. Scam unwitting newbies into parting with cash for ridiculous schemes anyone with a bit of Internet savvy know won’t work

Getting the picture of where I stand?

I also don’t like stupid personal blogs – but do get highly amused by just how bad some are…

I have no idea where this site is going at the moment – I guess I’m going to let it establish it’s own direction – but so far the plan is to throw in some irreverent blog reviews of terrible blogs,  give a few hints and tips on things that I KNOW works – and take a few guesses at others, perhaps the odd personal take on life and maybe expose the odd scam.

I’ll also be riddling the site with affiliate links – to things I like – and things – I don’t. And, I’m very interested to see if people do sometimes click through and buy the scams and trash I write about….. This blog, is a bit of an experiment – and will take shape, and find its’s own direction over time….