Work From Home Careers: The Psychology of Scams – Part 2

Hi welcome back, glad you found the Blog interesting enough to come back, if you subscribed to my RSS that way you will get told when I post straight away. Andrew Peel

In this second part of our examination of work from home careers and scams we explore why some are effective and therefore dangerous.

A work from home company needs care

Most people establish a work from home company of some form when they start a home business. If you set up any form of legal separate company then you are in the public record along with what services you offer.

This was how I was caught out when I was a raw Internet Marketer. I started my work from home career and was looking for ways to send traffic to my Internet site. As has now been proved I was becoming aware Google’s Adwords was falling out with the network marketing community.

I had heard of a technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a way of getting ranked in Google’s organic searches. What I was unaware of at the time was ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO. White hat I now know is the legitimate methods like Blogging, video articles, article marketing etc. as means to drive traffic to your site. Black hat is the shady methods used to trick Google into getting you listed in search engines.

Here is how I believe my new part-time career had been scammed. The company rang me out of the blue, knew which opportunity I was with and said they were endorsed by them (I later found out this was simply a lie). They had a slick line and even an online demo (I now believe it’s a rigged demo) where I entered my opportunities normal conversion rates and, ta da magically it said I could get 1,00O visitors a month. There was the hook, I had entered the figures not them.

The of course this was followed with a ‘time limited’ offer and I would get the package for $500 less, this was probably the normal price anyway. So yes I fell for it. Why do I now claim it was a scam? Firstly because by business opportunity later issued an alert against them and the pressure tactics they used. Secondly someone far more knowledgeable about how SEO works explained their approach would not work, it sounded plausible but in truth was the opposite. They asked me to pick keywords, again so they could say ‘well you picked the words’, when an ethical company would have helped me pick the keywords to fit my niche market.

The cost to me was well in excess of $1,000, the question is would the people in that company ‘mug’ me in the street for $1,000? Probably not, they are probably decent people looking to make a living. Here’s the other thing, they were dealing in electronic cash as opposed to real cash, my credit card.

Nearly all serious fraud involves electronic cash, the people committing the frauds simply fail to see taking money in this way as stealing. However they would see taking $1,000 cash as serious theft.

In conclusion they failed to deliver on every promise, refused me a refund and blamed the whole thing on my choice of words. So if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. Check the company out and ask for names of other people you can personally contact to check their work.

Andrew Peel

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