Look before you leap

What is the one thing that an Internet scam aims to do? Simple answer: separate you from your money. Solution: look carefully at any offer to help you to earn money that requires you to pay the company anything at all that seems excessive.

Paying for value received is one thing, paying for the benefit of being able to sell someone else's products is a benefit only to the company. It is also a warning to be careful.

That does not mean that all companies asking you to pay something for membership, services or products are scams. It does mean that you should check carefully.

Costly experience teaches lesson

This advice comes from my own costly experience. I, and thousands of others, paid from $1,900 to $44,900 each for Internet malls. The more you paid the greater the guaranteed annual income if purchasers worked a minimum of 10 hours a week. The top package was guaranteed to earn $200,000 a year, or your money back.

We should all have smelled something strange when, for a Wilmington, Delaware company, our payment had to be transferred to an Israeli bank.

No income, no response to all my e-mails, no return of my money