Too Good to be True

I’ve written a number of posts in this space about various employment scams – the one about The Millennium Centers scam is still one of my favorites – but I continue to be amazed by these particular confidence games. It’s amazing to me that anyone is still doing these, in a world where anyone who wants to can verify that these offers are a scam and that the people behind them are usually wanted in multiple states on felony charges with just a few minutes of Internet research, I would have expected that most con artists would have found a safer way of making money by now. But, of course, the really amazing part of these crimes is that in our modern world, anyone is still falling for these scams…

There was another story, this time in the US Today Economy site online, about several recent employment scams, and how crimes of this type are on the rise in the current economic downturn. Some of these are the traditional training and envelope-stuffing scams, where you pay $600 for materials that you then make crafts out of and sell back to the company at a profit, or $6,000 for “training” and client lists that turn out to be worthless, but others are adding a new wrinkle by combining credit card fraud with the traditional employment scams. The online article tells about one operation where the marks agreed to pay $1.95 for a “subscription” but failed to notice the illegibly small fine print where it said that if you don’t cancel your subscription within 24 hours, you will be charged an additional $49.95…

Now, I’m not saying that all mail-order and online business opportunities are scams. Actually, there are a number of opportunities online that have proven quite lucrative; it’s just that all of them require work on the part of the participants – and none of them require any significant money up front. The sad fact is that for many people the Internet is still a black box – unknowable and unfathomable technological magic. Millions of people – many of them otherwise sane! – actually believe that if you say it on the Internet it has to be true, that Wikipedia is an unimpeachable font of True Knowledge, and that if someone sends you an email claiming to be a Nigerian prince and offering you $40 million for a few moment’s work, it must be for real. Thus, they fall victim to frauds they would never give a moment’s thought to if they encountered them in any other format…

In all honesty, the linked news article is really more of a non-story than it is breaking news; people all over the world continue to fall prey to all manner of Internet scams, most of them far less credible than your average employment con. In just the past few months we’ve had another rash of Nigerian bank fraud scams, fake Publisher’s Clearinghouse scams, and phishing schemes where people actually fell for emails supposedly from their own banks requesting confidential information. Still, it probably bears repeating that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true, and if a company wants you to pay them $6,000 or $600 or even $6 upfront but will not guarantee that you’ll ever make a dime, you probably won’t…

And if you are victimized by any type of fraud just because you were too lazy to do the legwork and research the “company” involved before you gave them money you couldn’t afford to lose… Well, I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of sympathy from people whose lives have been destroyed in the current economic crisis, either…