Check Out That Money Making Opportunity!
Too many people today look at an opportunity online, fall for
the hyped claims and signup without thinking. You really need to
take a step back and examine it before joining. Here are some
things to consider.
One of the first things you should do is go through the site of
the program you are interested in and determine who is running
it, where they are located and what their contact information
is. Know who you are dealing with. If you can't find any of
that, that should bring up a red flag!
If you were referred to the program by someone, email them or
call them and find out what they know about the program, who
runs it, how long they have been involved and are they making
money. If they can't give answers, ask them for their sponsor's
name and email. Maybe they have information from being able to
access the program's member pages, from a welcome email they
received upon joining or maybe from checks/statements that they
might have received. If they don't have any information or are
reluctant to tell you, they may be promoting it in the dark.
If they have some company information, i.e., telephone number,
address or email addresses, contact the company and ask
questions about how many people they have in the program, how
long they have been in operation, do they have any business
references you could talk to and whatever else you want to ask.
If you email them and they don't get back to you timely or at
all, pop up another red flag. This may be an indication of the
type support you are going to get.
If you can't find any information on them through the above
avenues and you still want to do some research take the URL (web
site address) i.e., www.theirname.com and go to one of the major
search engines and enter the address (theirname.com) or the name
of the company.
The other day I searched on a company that has been around for a
number of years. I entered the name of the company in quotes at
Iwon.com and got a list of almost 25,000 sites. By doing this
you can then check out some of the sites that you find for
contact information or at least find other members who you could
contact.
Another place you can go if you can't find any contact
information on the company is a domain registration site. Take
the URL of the company you are checking and go to:
Network Solutions Whois Site
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois and enter
the URL. You should in most cases be able to determine who
registered the domain name, where they are located, a telephone
number and/or email address. This will be under the
Administrative contact section. You can also determine who hosts
the site.
If the URL ends in one of the new domain types i.e., .tv, .ta,
or .de for example I generally use the register.com site since
it has info on these type domains: Register.com
http://www.register.com
There are a couple of discussion boards that may have
information that may help you. They are:
Victims Against Scams
http://pub31.ezboard.com/bvictimsagainstscams
Friends In Business (Scams 101)
http://friendsinbusiness.com/board/index.cgi?
iCop! Discussion Forum (International Council of Online
Professionals) http://pluto.beseen.com/boardroom/h/50220/
The Home Business & Marketing Discussion Board
http://www.homebizlink.com/wwwboard
A couple of sites that you may want to also check are:
The Consumer Sentinel http://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/
Internet ScamBusters http://www.scambusters.org
The Federal Trade Commission http://www.ftc.gov
One other resource is the good old online telephone books. If
you have an address or telephone number go to
www.yellowpages.com or www.whitepages.com and check them out.
You can use the telephone number and do a "reverse directory
check" which checks the telephone number and gives you a name
and address. You can also check out the address that you have
and sometimes may be able to tell if the address is a valid
business office or a mail drop by making a couple of telephone
calls.
If you are getting ready to spend some of your hard earned money
by joining a money making opportunity whether it is a one time
cost or a monthly cost, make sure that you check it out. First
you want to reassure yourself that it is legit and secondly if
you are going to promote it, you want to make sure you have
confidence in it since you are going to risk your reputation by
recommending it to others.