Being scammed, especially in the make money online field, is something most people will have heard of. For the most part, we can say that many companies offer good techniques and strategies for making money, but their products and their presentation of the information is very poor. Coupled with that is the lack of support and help once the purchase is made. Therefore, you have to make sure that you get good solid information, good instruction, and good support.
To make real big money is very doable for almost anyone provided they are equipped with the right knowledge, are given good instruction and are dedicated enough to reach their goals.
Another very heavily promoted scam is "paid surveys". You must have come across claims such as "Earn $100 per hour filling out simple surveys". How this scam works is that people are asked to pay a fee ranging from $35 to $50 dollars in order to gain access to a list of companies that offer paid surveys. The surveying companies themselves do not charge people for taking surveys, rather they pay participants who complete their surveys subject to certain requirements such as age, demographics, gender etc.
Many, if not most, paid survey offers do not deliver the rewards they promise. There are a number of ways that paid surveys mislead or inconvenience participants. Many of them compile personal information about participants to sell to marketers. Others require people to pay to access a database of survey opportunities that the participants could find on their own for free.
Survey databases can cost participants money. Many databases let people have access to lists of paid survey opportunities for a subscription fee. Once people have paid the fee, they discover that many of the surveys listed do not pay, and that nearly all of the listings are available elsewhere for free. Many of these offers seem legitimate because they feature phony testimonials from satisfied users.
A few people might be fortunate enough to earn some regular money, but it will never amount to much, no more than a few hundred dollars per month at best!
Once upon a time, multi-level marketing was a legitimate business which provided a way for small companies to get their unique products to consumers in small towns and rural areas which had no access to these products. At this time, the products sold themselves, and the multi-level aspect was a way of giving a small reward to those who had worked hard to build the organization. But the focus was always on the product.
Today, and especially with the growth of the internet, it is possible for consumer to get about whatever they want at competitive prices. There is simply no real need for distribution "systems" as there once was, and indeed the focus of all the programs is not on the products they sell -- which are usually either bogus or are available somewhere else to the public at the same or lesser prices. Instead, the focus now is solely on recruiting new people to either buy into the program or else to buy products that are grossly overpriced (i.e., a $1 bottle of "herbal shampoo" for $26), with the idea that those people will recruit additional people who will also buy into the program or themselves buy the grossly overpriced products.
Thus, today just about ALL of the multi-level marketing programs are scams. In today's internet economy, there is simply no need for multi-level marketing or the overpriced products that they sell -- meaning that the only thing they are selling are memberships in anticipation that future memberships will be sold in the future, which is the classic definition of a pyramid scheme, and thus securities fraud.
Because products are available over the internet to everybody at lower costs than ever before, claims that "Multi-Level Marketing will take over the World!" are completely bogus. Indeed, the fact that no MLM schemes sell significant product to anybody other than the people who bought into the programs is proof positive that MLM is a dinosaur in today's economy, and exists only by defrauding people to buy memberships in anticipation of being able to make a profit defrauding other people into the program.
Source: www.quatloos.com
Paid surfing is a type of pyramid scheme and draws heavily upon the functioning of typical MLM programs. To really make money, credits, points, or get free gifts, you have to rely upon getting other people to surf.
Practically speaking, you have to surf specified websites for fixed periods of time. In return you get paid for clicking through to the websites you are surfing. An offshoot of this is "paid to read email" - whereby you have read emails and click through the links contained within them.
A lot of wild claims came with paid to surf, such as "make anything from $1 to $150 just for reading one email". Fortunately, paid to surf has pretty much died out in the US and UK, though it still exists in other countries.
All of these programs are a huge waste of your time, and you will not make any money, except a few cents a week!