How to Spot Internet Scams – My Step by Step Guide

There are absolutely loads of internet scams everywhere you look, they claim to show you how to make money and they use all sorts of media to reach out to you. I will teach you how to spot internet scams so that you can protect yourself against them.

Once you get the idea of how they market themselves through what I am going to share with you, you will actually see they stand out more than you thought. As they all pretty much you the same idea.

First, let’s think about why we look for these so-called get-rich-quick schemes. We do it because we all reach a point in our lives where we decide enough is enough. Either because your job is getting you down or you are facing financial difficulties and you need to know how to make money from home.  I’d say 90% of the country faces this at one time or another mainly because 10% of the population controls 90% of the wealth and 90% of the population control 10% of the wealth. This has always been the case as the rich get richer and we all just get by best we can. Well, that’s when we decide there must be a better way, we decide we need more money now rather than later.

Let’s Get Something Cleared Up First

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 If something looks too good To be true! It usually Is!… Always trust your gut instincts.

Our gut instincts help and guide us along the way and you can never go far wrong. Just don’t like the excitement and desperation to mix together and cloud your judgement. When you are like this you are basically deciding to go with your head or your gut! Your gut tends to tell you what’s right and wrong and helps guide you from past experiences. Your head can sometimes get in the way either too excited or overthinking.

Time to search Google

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We always start by sitting there one day, picking up the laptop and we end up asking Google how to make money online, or how to make money from home. We never search get rich quick schemes because that isn’t really what we are after we just want to make money. We are searching for ideas we haven’t thought of, ideas that people have spent time already studying and mastering. After all, if someone else has done it so can we.

When searching how to make money online the results you will tend to see are things like:

• How to get paid for surveys
• User testing sites and giving feedback
• Online Marketing
• Multi Level Marketing
• Paid to search the web

These are all great ways to learn how to make money online but they don’t make the big bucks for everyone. Maybe a small percentage might make loads of money. You could make around £10 to £20 for some of them at a time which is ok if you can do loads of them. I will cover these in more detail later on because they are all worth discussing.

The thing to remember about these they are fine to top up your cash but all your doing is trading time for money, just like a job and there is only so much time available.

But they aren’t the only things you will find, you will also see search results like these:

• Earn £500 a day from home
• Earn an extra £400 per month
• make thousands a week
• earn thousands from sitting at home
• just one click earns hundreds

All these sound more attractive but as you see more and more offers your head and guts start working against each other. The sound of all this extra money is very exciting and we know how much we would love to have it.

So we get excited and start clicking on them, we then get signed up hoping they are legit!

So Scam or Legit?

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These sites will mostly look really professional, well they would do, they wouldn’t set a scam up with a cheap-looking website as no one would go any further. So they have to make it really professional with loads of vibrant fonts and images.

They are trying to make it exciting and will try their best to get you to sign up as quickly as possible as they know you are currently battling with your head and gut instincts. So they know they need to enforce the head decision by really dangling the carrot and trying to offset the balance.

This is when we start looking deeper into the site. Is it or isn’t it legit?

Tired of trying to spot internet Scams and just want to find a 100% Legit Way to Make Money Online?

Limited Time or Slots Available

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Limited time is a very common technique used on scamming sites so I look for this first, they use it to make you sign up quickly before you have the time to rationally think it through. You will usually see a timer for a short period of time between 5 and 20 minutes and this will be extremely visible. They will also keep referring to this if they have a promotional video playing. The aim is to get you excited and make you think ‘I might miss out!’.

The other technique is to tell you they can only accept a limited amount of people, like 20 people. They then tell you some rubbish about it’s the maximum amount of people they can coach at a time, allowing them to give those 20 people the quality coaching needed to be successful.

Sometimes they will tell you that you have been specially selected or invited to their VIP members group and then start telling you that you need to sign up quickly before you run out of time as they can only take a limited amount of people and you might not get a chance again.

All these are scamming techniques to get you to sign up before you can properly think about it and realise it’s a scam.

Remember legitimate businesses don’t need to rush you into a decision as they have trust in their own product so don’t need to use these techniques!

Testimonials

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You will see testimonials from apparent people like yourselves that have taken the plunge and come out with thousands. They look like really well-written and very real-looking photos of so-called genuine people.

The funny thing is that if you were to search for images on stock photo sites, these are sites that sell you photos and images for companies and websites. You’ll come across, that exact photo! Sometimes they don’t even try too hard and they just grab them off google images.

A great technique to debunk these testimonials is to right-click on the photos and you will see a drop-down box that says search Google for this image. If you get search results that show the images belonging to a different name than the site you know it’s a scam. You will also get results like links to stock photo sites where you buy images, this is a popular choice for scamming sites. They buy the image and then make up the testimonial and the name.

If you come across video testimonials remember one thing most people don’t like to film and are really self-conscious so if they do a real testimonial they will seem uncomfortable. Yet most video testimonials are really confident people well spoken and comfortable on camera because they are actors! All scammers use actors to promote their products and services. The question you then ask is if this was legit why are they faking the testimonials unless, oh yes, it’s a scam! That’s the point when you need to close the window and look away.

Start your search again and carry on your research!

Read Online Reviews

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Another great way to find out if a site is legit or not is to read reviews. Take the name of the site or community and type it into Google again. For example, when I came across a scam called Brit method for example. (I removed my review now as it’s long gone). I just typed ‘Is Brit Method a Scam’ in Google and suddenly more sites start popping up. You will see searches like:

• Brit Method Scam Exposed
• Brit method – Scam
• Brit Method Legit?
• Brit Method Truth revealed!

This is where other’s are there to help you. Chances are other bloggers have already spotted it and done what they can to find out for you, in their opinion, if it’s a scam or not. Because when you have spent time looking at scams you begin to see common themes and signs that start to stand out and protect like-minded people like ourselves from being caught out and losing money.

Think of us as wardens of the internet protecting everyone genuinely looking for ways to make money from being done over. Unfortunately, there are people out there who want to get rich quickly by stealing money from other people. So as long as they keep trying we will keep sniffing them out and protect everyone from them.

The Lengths The Scammer Will Go

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Fake Sites

As I said before they get really well-made sites but they won’t make just one. These guys go all out. They will use different media and every step of the way they will use every way they possibly can to lie and cheat their way to get it.

Brit Method for example even posted images of Richard Branson saying that he had leaked the best-kept secret to making money that only the wealthy were using. One heck of a lie but how many people might have seen that and thought that if Richard Branson thought it was good it must be real?

They even made sites that look like popular newspaper screenshots, showing reviews about a mum working from home that came across a great scheme and made thousands per week which changed her life! The lengths they will go hold no bounds. Facebook get loads of scam advertising on their pages that use this same technique.

When learning to spot internet scams you will learn that scammers will even make multiple sites for different countries so that they can scam people from all around the world. Some quick telltale signs are:

• They will use sites that look too similar in build but with different company names.
• They will sometimes cut corners and not even type different information. I found one with a typo and five sites that looked all different so you would think it’s a different scheme but the text was identical on every site even down to the typo. Rookie mistake! but thankfully they made it.
• So look for grammar mistakes and typing errors.

Conclusion

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There are so many scams out there and more are appearing every day. You need to make sure you do plenty of research before you take the plunge and only do so if you are completely happy with doing it. If you have any reservations do some more research.

So be very careful else you could easily spend years searching and getting caught out while still looking for the next making money business, I know I did.

My Top Tip: Never sign up for anything without researching first by using these techniques.

They will save you time and effort and most of all stress and worry!

If you’re tired of searching and open to joining a legit business where you can learn how to easily build a website that you can earn money from, check out my post:   #1 recommendation for making money online.

Hi, I’m Graham I am the founder and creator of grahamhodsdon.com I hope you found this post useful, How to Spot Internet Scams, or if you have something to add to help others detect scams please share a comment below. Also if you have seen a business offer you would like me to investigate to find out if it is a scam or not add this to your comment and I will write a review on them. Thanks for reading.