Apart all the useful stuff and information the Internet is also full of a lot of scams and fraudulent practices. As the old scams get to be known by most people a lot of new ones emerge all the time in order to fool unsuspecting Internet users.
In this article I’ll list you all the new scams that emerged and became infamous in 2014.
MLM for various health products
Now, this isn’t a completely new idea and has been around for ages but apparently around 2013-2014 these scams have reached the mainstream. These scams work by pretending to offer money making possibilities to people in need.
Companies like these approach people in need of money and tell them that they can make money by becoming marketers for their products. The only thing these people will have to do is to convince their friends to become marketers themselves. Once those friends will promote and sell the products of the company the person who convinced them to join will receive a commission on their sales.
These companies usually present a chart according to which if you refer an X number of friends and each one of them refers another Y, then you will be making massive amounts of money by just getting the commissions based on the sales that your friends and their friends etc. generate.
The scam is that marketing of this kind never works. You will not be able to build a long pyramid of friends who all are top marketers who sell many products offered by the company. This stuff just doesn’t works.
On the other hand, in order to participate you will be obliged by the company to make an initial purchase of certain products the company offers. Supposedly this is in order so you may learn and test each product in order to be able to better promote them.
If you haven’t figured it out yet by now, then let me write it down in plain language: YOU are the end customer.
Essentially what’s happening in these scams is that the company does not even intend you to go out and find people to recruit them as marketers. All they are interested in is to get you to purchase the “trial” product package they offer. If you actually manage to convince some of your friends to join then that’s even better as he or she will also have to purchase that so-called trial package.
Binary options
Binary options are a form of financial trading that allow people to bet on the future movement of various financial assets such as gold, silver etc. Essentially, in binary options you will have to predict if the value of an asset will go up or go down during a given time frame.
If your prediction will be correct then you will win a certain amount of money promised before you opened the trade. If you lose, you’ll lose all the money you’ve invested into opening the bet.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this concept expect that a significant number of websites that offer binary options are simply a scam. Once you make a deposit at these websites you will never see your money back. Even if you actually win, the website will simply refuse to pay you no matter what.
While there are legitimate binary options companies available on the Internet, there is a long list of binary options brokers that are a scam and a fraud, as shown on the linked page. So, for the sake of safety people should be staying away complete from this form of trading until the waters will settle.
Fitness Products
Fitness products are nothing new but like the previous two scams they also became increasingly popular this year. Fitness scammers in the past sold their fake products on low-quality websites with terrible designs, which resulted in people avoiding these sites during the recent years.
These days it’s almost impossible to sell health products on a low-quality and ugly websites, as these sites are – rightfully – associated with fraud and scams. For this reason, scammers upgraded their arsenal and began creating nice and shiny websites that follow common web-development and marketing best practices.
The products these websites sell can range from various issues such as fast muscle gain, fat loss, libido enhancement and more. However, all they have in common is that they are usually completely fake.
While these products might not necessarily do any harm (as they usually only contain sugar or flour) they are obviously a complete waste of money.
So, how to distinguish legit online fitness retailers from scams? – There’s two ways. One is to only purchase from providers that also have a very strong offline retail presence. The other is not to purchase any fitness and health products from the Internet and rather ask for advice and recommendations from a licensed physician.
Internet stock trading
Internet stock trading is obviously not a scam in itself. There’s a massive number of online stock trading platforms offered over the internet and a large number of people use them on a daily basis.
The problem with Internet stock trading is that a lot of trading companies have emerged that prey on people with zero trading experience. They usually offer so-called deposit bonuses, which is additional money given on people’s deposits, in order to convince them to register and trade.
These companies generally don’t care if you win or lose as they take a away a commission from the money you have deposited and invested. Sometimes they even get a commission from the companies they recommend you to invest in. You’ve seen The Wolf of Wall Street? – That’s how some online trading sites work.
These are the most prevalent online scams in 2014. As you can see, most of these are disguised as legitimate form of marketing, trading, investing or self-improvement. This is the reason why you have to be very cautions these days when dealing with these things.http://www.debtroundup.com/top-4-internet-scams-frauds-2014/
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