YourFreeProxy toolbar is not free, it's a scam!

I've said it several times before that a major alarm bell is when a website recommends itself as 'as seen on Foxnews, CNN etc'. Your Free Proxy offers to unblock any website anywhere, it's basically a proxy that allows you to download it but is a struggle to remove in the same way that malware is. It claims to be 'most trusted proxy site with 187 million downloads'. What it doesn't tell you (well it actually does in a cryptic way if you read the terms and conditions.. is that it mines your bitcoins.

It does not seem clear whether the paid version does the same. 

Make money online ad - $4,000,000,000 daily turnover - is it a scam?

When I saw this advert, I was pretty surprised and obviously the numbers might be a little exaggerated. Surely $2,000,000,000 would do you quite nicely. Anyway I did a bit of research and it seems that Supertradingonline.com is ran by a stock market wizard who goes by the name of 'superman' on various forums. Whether you decide to fork out on his training or not, depends if you are really smart enough to follow the training and play the stock market. If you have the initial money to invest in it and if you have the bottle. 'Superman' seems to be one of the good guys out there and is simply amazing at finding companies whose stocks rise. 

You can take a look at his twitter account https://twitter.com/super_trades before you go ahead and purchase and also decide if it's definitely the thing for you rather than being blinded by the numbers!

Rejected by WebAnswers.com? Why?

I recently made an attempt to sign up to Web Answers. Webanswers.com is basically the equivalent to Yahoo Questions but they actually pay you a slice of the advertising revenue when you give the best answer. Some people defraud them by establishing other accounts, writing a question and then answering it with another of their accounts. Of course Web Answers are keen to crack down on this understandably but I know it happens as I've seen people boasting about it. It skews the results of the question and gives them a pay day.

Well unlike these folks, my intentions were honourable. I just wanted to test out earning some money on the site and report back the results and yet I was rejected (each application is vetted).

Well here's why..

http://www.webanswers.com/member-agreement.cfm

I'm on the list of banned countries. It seems a bit racist but ultimately it's their perogative. Perhaps they simply can't pay people residing in those countries? 

Postanyarticle.com: Is Post Any Article a scam?

I do not believe Post Any Article is a scam, they have no reason to be. Unless sites hold a high-ranking, there's really no reason to write your article anywhere else than your own blog or website though. Sure they give you a share of the profits but if you wanted to, you could have it all for yourself. A lot of people use websites like Post Any Article to cross-post, this will not bring you much traffic in. Others choose to write about their daily life, which is also not going to bring in a great deal of advertising revenue. 

What you really want is decent content with good keywords. I'm not totally sure how the Adsense model works with sites like Post Any Article because there are bound to be posts that break the Adsense policies before the moderators latch on to it, in that case they could technically lose their Adsense account surely? A lot of readers are there to make money and write and are not likely to be clicking on your adverts.

Either way, the majority of these kind of sites do eventually seem to pack up and while they offer money for putting very little effort into it, I'm of the belief that you'd be better off writing on your own. Of course that can also go wrong, should you not abide to the Adsense rules. 

Why Skip McGrath's Amazon Affiliate Package Is Not Worth It

Skip McGrath is one of the many online sellers offering an e-book on how to earn your riches from setting up a website with Amazon Affiliates. Whilst I'm not going to say it's a scam, buying such a book is a waste of money. There is a whole host of people who buy up these books and don't act on it or don't put enough time in to the final product and then give it up. Setting up an Amazon Affiliate blog or website is not particularly complicated.

All you need to do is:

Set up an Amazon associates account
Find a niche
Write catchy blogposts / reviews in the area of your product
Post the widget (preferably with an image) at the end of your blogpost

The results will vary depending on the items that you are focussing on. Music, for example is not a particularly good idea. Less people buy music than ever before, there's quite a lot of websites that review albums and so it's quite tricky to compete, unless you focus on a less popular type of music. The price of albums is relatively low and as your earnings are commission based, you are better off looking at more expensive items.

So nothing particularly against Skip, I just think that what he's got to say is widely available info, some people act on it and some people don't. It's not as easy as he makes out but it is a feasible form of income. 

How Buying or Selling Amazon or Argos Vouchers on E-bay Can Turn into a Dangerous Scam

If you are into the making money online game - for example through writing, then the time will probably come that you have to many Amazon vouchers and want to offload some on E-bay. 

You will see that there is quite a market for this as not everyone has a credit card. It's a dangerous game to play though. 

If you are a seller beware that:

Hypothetical Situation #1 -The buyer makes the purchase, sends the money over. You send them the code. You check your paypal account a few hours later and the transaction is frozen because the buyer's account is expected to be fraudulent. They've used your code and you don't get the money.

Hypothetical Situation #2 - The buyer makes the purchase and sends the money over. You send them the code. The buyer makes a claim on paypal that he didn't get the item. In the past this was a common occurrence and you would get neither money or code. I believe that this is no longer possible and that's because of situation #3.

There are plenty of people there that see that buying a $100 Amazon voucher for $90 is good business but it's not always the case. If you are a buyer beware that:

Hypothetical Situation #3 - As a buyer you send them the money. You do not get your code. You contact E-bay or Paypal but they cannot help. They do not protect buyers of Vouchers.

This applies not only to Amazon vouchers but to all types of vouchers on E-bay.

Is Flipping4Profit a scam site?

My first thought when I looked at Flipping4Profit is that it was too good to be true. Becoming a member costs you $100 and it's not overly clear what the minimum investment is. It's all very eye friendly the website but there's not enough proof of purchases - documents and the like.

I would not like to say that it's a scam for sure, as I have no proof but websites that specialise in flipping real estate profits are often based on a pyramid scheme. What they do is pretend that the house was sold for a higher amount than it actually was, investors are happy with their returns and word spreads, more people plough money in until one day it eventually collapses.

As with all pyramid schemes, if you get in early you can actually make a profit, regardless or not of it's legitimacy. If you recommend it to your friend's or business partners, you could potentially lose those ties when it all goes pear-shaped.

Is Bubblews a Scam? They closed my account

The latest writing website on the market is Bubblews, they claim that 'the days of sharing ad revenue with the content creators is over', but for how long? Bubblews appears to be a bit of a pyramid scheme. Some people are getting paid out, certainly enough to keep people signing up and keep writing. There is also a downside and a lot of people are very vocal about it.

Out of interest I went over there and set up an account. I read the terms of using the site and steered clear from stealing content or any of the obvious things that would get you thrown off a website like that. I wrote two rather straight forward posts about football on different days. A few days later I logged in and it wouldn't accept my password, I tried to click on 'forgot my password' and I was told that no such account existed. I checked the links to my old posts and they had been deleted, the account was no where to be seen and the $3.00 I had accumulated had vanished in to thin dust.

I had no explanation and never received a reply from them. Even if for some reason they are not a scam, they could do this to anyone at any time. So if you're getting a payout, milk them for what they are worth but be aware that they could pull the income from you at any time, so don't put too much heart into it.