Posts Tagged ‘smart money websites’

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…