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SECRETS OF THE PYRAMIDS: INTERNET SCAMS AND RIPOFFS
"A GUIDE TO AVOIDING SCAMS AND FRAUDS, BEFORE YOU BECOME A VICTIM
OF THEM"
INTRODUCTION
The information in this document is intended to help you avoid the
scams and rip-offs that can be found on the internet (and other
places) and help you to find a legitimate business opportunity that
will benefit you and those you sponsor in that opportunity.
If you feel that an opportunity is a scam or you have been ripped
off by one contact a lawyer or one of the agencies that are listed
at the end of this article.
Scams, Rip-offs, Frauds, by whatever name you use ... they all have
one thing in common that separates them from legitimate business
opportunities. Any legitimate business opportunity should represent
a win-win situation for everyone involved, producers, sellers and
consumers. In scams, somebody (usually you) loses.
TYPES OF FRAUDS, SCAMS AND CHEATS
Below is a listing of common types of frauds and scams. The basic
descriptions describe clearly illegal scams. There are similar
programs which may or may not be illegal based on their clearly
having a product (though not that is worth what is paid for it). The
basic rule to remember is that you're trying to succeed in business,
not prosecute felons. For your purposes barely legal isn't much
better than illegal, you'll still probably lose.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc, treat it like a
duck no matter how much they try to tell you that it is technically
something else because...... I'll go into a little more detail with
each of the descriptions below.
The Chain Letter
... one of the easiest to start and hardest to stop of the illegal
schemes that you'll find.
Basically this is an offer to let you send money to one or all of a
list of names on the document you're looking at. In exchange for
sending this money you get to replace one of the names with yours
and send out a bunch of letters to get people to send the money to
you.
This is absolutely illegal. Even if it is done via e-mail and or
internet news groups, if at any point the money is mailed through
the U.S. Postal Service they will gladly and strongly prosecute it
for what it is, an illegal chain letter. Sometimes you will see
"products" attached to these in order to make them "legal". One
example I have seen was each person having a cookie recipe along
with their name and saying that your money to each person was to buy
their recipe.
Put this to the duck test, would you really pay $5 each for four or
five cookie recipes that aren't exclusive and aren't something you
could use to start a specialty cookie shop. If you wouldn't be
willing to pay this much for just the recipes, would any reasonable
person do so (maybe you don't like cookies). If not, treat this like
a duck..er scam and whether the law can stop them or not isn't your
problem. Your problem is to avoid this scam and look for another
opportunity.
The Pyramid Scheme
Basically this is selling people membership in your organization,
which entitles them to sell other people memberships. The clearly
illegal version of this sells nothing but the memberships. State
Attorneys do pursue these and prosecute those they feel clearly fail
the duck test (no other reasonable value given with the membership).
If all you get is the right to market this and some tools to he
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