What Should I Be Careful of Online?

Well the first thing to do is to have a think about what you are trying to achieve. A scammer is like a fisherman hoping to snare a fish. They are on the lookout for a certain mindset or state of mind, and that mindset is referred to as get rich quick. Now the thing about that state of mind is that it is a delusion. Getting rich quick only happens under very rare circumstances and certainly not by searching the internet for schemes to get rich quickly.

Getting rich quickly is something that has been associated with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin recently, and that is why we see a lot of scams relating to Bitcoin. In other words, Bitcoin is a keyword that the get rich quick mindset might stimulate people to search for. This is why so many scams have Bitcoin in the title, such as Bitcoin Prime, Bitcoin Code, Bitcoin Revolution and Bitcoin Rush. These are, in fact, all the same scam with a different name and/or website.

Question 1 - Am I asking to be ripped off?

 

Can I Get Rich Quick?

People spend their lives reading the Economist and don't make that much money. If you are looking to get rich quick you are inviting the scammers into your world.

What are Scammers Looking for?

So as you can see, scammers are on the lookout for certain words, but they also operate more aggressive tactics, and one of those tactics is association. Association is another part of why they might use a keyword like Bitcoin. It has been in the news and so it must be real and really make people rich, right? Well sure, emerging technology is often what we see as the latest way to make money, but by the time it is on the News, it is generally because you have missed the boat. Association is how you convince people you are legitimate, and that you really can make people rich. In other words, it is pretending you have a connection to something or someone that you obviously do not.

If you look closely at the advertisement square, in the bottom left hand corner, you can just about see the word Ad. 

Let's have a look at an example:

Now this is a screenshot from MSN, which you expect to be a reliable and safe website, but it is anything but. MSN is a site full of misinformation and mostly motivated by greed. These are two very dangerous ingredients to be cooking up a website with. Greed is very dangerous because it overpowers people's concern for those readers browsing a site.

Which Websites Can I Trust Now?

If you look at the screenshot from MSN then you can see that this advert, circled, has been placed amongst all of the people we are used to seeing on the web. Actors, leaders, historical figures and sportspeople. So why is there an advert stuck right in the middle for a get rich scheme of a very similar format to all of the articles spaced around it? This is a highly dangerous situation for a website reader. There is an Amazon sign in the back, and pictures of stock market graphs climbing up, and yet this advert has nothing to do with Amazon stock or even Amazon itself. It has allied itself to a global mega-company in order to waive our concerns. MSN cannot be trusted on the evidence above, which we assure is real and representative as we captured it from MSN ourselves.

This form of trickery is very common. Subterfuge. To disguise yourself as something else in order to sneak past barriers or controls. Computer people refer to it as a Trojan, which is odd as the horse was Greek.

Can I Trust any Website?

If you look very carefully in the bottom left hand corner of the advertisement square, you can just about see the word Ad. This is all the warning you get that this part of the website is from an external source that the publisher has almost no visibility of whatsoever. In other words, no advert can be automatically trusted, and every big social media or search site makes its money from adverts. Many of these scam adverts deliberately impersonate big companies.

Let's have a look at another example of this:

As you can see this is an advert on Facebook. You have to look very carefully, but you can see the word Sponsored at the top, which means that it is a paid advert that Facebook have obviously made no effort whatsoever to analyse as it is misrepresenting one of the richest internet sites on Earth. Don't think there is anything they won't use, here is another:

As you can see the posting person has managed to get another account to 'like' their post already, so they can appear more legitimate and trusted.

OK so here is a very important question to ask yourself:

Question 2 - Am I reading an advert?

 

Can I Trust any Sponsored Content?

Well the big problem here is that advertising has become dangerous. Anyone can advertise on a website. You do not need an advertising company to do it anymore. I could start an account and advertise on Facebook today, and pretend to be anything.  All I have to do to get my advert online is appease the tests of the Facebook AI that inspects adverts. If anyone reports my advert, I just start a new account and do it all over again. In other words, there is no such thing as a safe website anymore. There are too many dangerous adverts around and this is down to one thing, affiliate networks.

You can read our page on the scourge of affiliate networks and what they have done to the internet on out affiliate networks page but for now we will just give a brief explanation.

What is an Affiliate Network?

An affiliate network is a network of people earning a fee for selling something on someone else's behalf. If I was selling shoes online for example, I might contact an affiliate network and offer a sum of money to anyone that could get someone to buy a pair of my shoes online. So offering a small sum of money would get some people to email others and recommend my shoes with an affiliate link that tells me which affiliate got me the sale. The code in the link is how the affiliate network knows which affiliate got me the sale and who I need to pay. Now this is all very well and good, but what happens if I offer a thousand dollars for a successful sale? Well, what happens is that the most unscrupulous people begin using any means possible to get people to click on the link, just so they can get their one thousand dollars. This is how a lot of scams work.

How Do Affiliate Networks Fit In?

A scammer knows that they can rinse the right candidate out of thousands and thousands of dollars, so they are prepared to pay handsomely for one to show up. This means that there are thousands of affiliates fighting over those fees, and everyone of them has affiliate links that point back to that scam, and they are changing all the time as each affiliates spies what the other affiliates have come up with. A search engine treats all of this activity as if these sites are popular and so begins to rank them well. Then the affiliates have to start paying fees to get adverts above their competition and boom! The scammers have turned Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google into their agents, as well as all of the influencers that carry their messages. Affiliate networks allow scammers to operate facelessly on the internet without divulging their country of residence or anything. They literally get everyone else to do their bidding, and no one is obviously committing a crime!

Are All Affiliate Networks Bad?

Not necessarily, in fact most affiliate networks do not go out to be dangerous, but they are a form of advertising, so you need to be extremely careful. Affiliates are the basis for a lot of sponsorship on sites like YouTube or Instagram. An influencer on Instagram might give out an affiliate link when they show off a product, even one that they really use themselves, and a link explaining to the advertiser who is buying and who is not is vital for their reporting. A merchant needs to know which adverts return customers and which don't. The problem is, that they can be misused just like Facebook or Google Ads. It is probably quite difficult to police, but in our experience, no matter how often you report these ads to Facebook, or especially Google, no action is ever taken.

So here is an example of how desperate these affiliates get to come up with something that will persuade people to sign up for a scam that offers them a thousand dollars for every valid prospective client:

As you can see this is a website claiming that Phillip and Holly interviewed Jeremy Clarkson about his new money making venture and that he makes most of his money from some crypto-trading app rather than his books and television. Jeremy Clarkson would not be very likely to go onto This Morning as it is mostly a programme for mothers which is their audience, and Jeremy just isn't the kind of person that stops them changing the channel.

Keep an eye out for the word Advertorial above any of these idiotic sites. It just means the whole thing is a lie and no one is using any automatic money making apps.

Question 3 -0 Who Is Writing this Review?

 

What are Fake Review Sites?

One of the biggest bugbears we have online is the ever increasing issue of fake review sites. With many searches these days you are seeing fake review sites arrive at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) as if it is the actual truth. Let's have a look at an example:

Here we are doing a search of 'Jeremy Clarkson Bitcoin' and have a look at what comes up:

The top two results are indexuniverse.eu and economywatch.com. Now lets have a look at who owns these sites. Let's start with IndexUniverse.eu:

As you can see, whoever has invented this site and its supposed reviews cannot even spell Baltimore and so is obviously not only not American, but has never even been there, and so their New York offices are a lie. They have not even bothered to find out if the street exists which means that they are not any kind of business, just an affiliate in a bedroom somewhere.

 

 And if we have a look at EconomyWatch.com:

You can see that the site is run by a company called Finixio. Finixio run a lot of these sites, in fact they run two of the comparison sites that appear on the first page of Google for this search term. InsideBitcoins.com is a Finixio site. If we have a look at this site we can see very easily that they are promoting crypto-trading robots which we will talk about below. These robots are not real and are part of a scam. This site is not a reviewer, but another affiliate.

 

Here we come to another affiliate tactic. Running whole series of fake review sites where fake reviews are hidden amongst articles offering advice. We can see in the below screenshot that Finixio are advertising affiliate links to known scams on their sites:

British Bitcoin Profit and Bitcoin Era are prime examples of the get rich quick mindset being exploited as we discussed earlier. Each of them has an affiliate link next door and here we can prove intent. These reviewers cannot possibly have used these robots because they do not exist, so these reviews are knowingly published lies. Finixio are a company fuelled by scamming and they know it!

It is a sad fact, but many of the reviews online are bait for scams now and there is little trust deserved by any of the review sites including established ones like TrustPilot. The scammer affiliate fees are so attractive that they have corrupted huge parts of the internet and no amount of reporting ever makes any difference. We have taken our plea to the Serious Fraud Office and ActionFraud but no one is listening. All of the watchdogs so nothing as they have no power. They simply help people feel safe which plays into the hands of the scammers!

Fake review sites are everywhere so always read the small print before anything else!

Question 4 -  'How can this be true if money has value?'

 

What Are Crypto-Trading Robots?

This sounds like a very complicated thing but a completely wonderful idea. A robot that can trade for you that makes a profit. The problem comes when you start to think about what this could mean. If you walk into the newsagent tomorrow to buy something, and the guy behind the desk says, 'Sorry we don't need money anymore, a machine makes it for free out the back.' then things are going to get difficult. Money has value because it is hard to get. If it could be made by a robot then it would be worthless and all of the markets worldwide would crash. Even if you managed to programme a successful one the FBI would come and arrest you straight away for one reason or another. It is quite simply a ludicrous idea.

Crypto-trading robots allegedly do this (they don't!) with cryptocurrency and make people a profit from that. All of these trading robots, whether they be new Chinese currencies, oil profit robots, programmed by NASA scientists or invented by Elon Musk are all a nonsense. There is no way to make money for free because it means money is worthless, and so why would you want to make it anymore. Stay away from any trading products unless you are well versed in that market or product. There is no easy path to riches, remember that and you will be much harder to rip-off.