Five Top Things That Set Off My BS Alarm

by Rick Hendershot

The web is overflowing with scams. Thousands and thousands of otherwise normal people are looking for ways to make big money by doing NOTHING. Still, we persist in thinking there are some legitimate opportunities on the web. Yes there are. But how do you tell the scams from the real things?

Here are five things that set off my BS-Alarm.

Number 1 BS-Alarm Tripper: "You can make thousands of dollars a week, almost immediately."

There are thousands and thousands of sites that make claims like this. But this kind of BS is not limited to the web. The other day I saw a TV ad where the testimonial guy said he was soon going to be making $20,000 per week. Think about that for a minute. That is more than a million dollars a year, selling products of questionable value. This guy is going from zero to a million dollars in just a few weeks. Maybe Donald Trump can pull that off (at least in his own mind), but not your average Joe Trump.

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Number 2 BS-Alarm Tripper: No actual product is being sold.

This is not always easy to detect. Many "marketing" schemes claim to be selling "valuable information", but in fact are only selling you the "rights" to resell the same program (ebook, etc.) to other suckers. This is what you might call "the 24 hour plan": I'll sell you a "report" for $5, then you sell it to all your friends and relatives, then they can do the same. You aren't buying my report because of the information in it. You are just buying it to resell it. The actual content of the report is irrelevant. It could just be a blank report or a page of nonsense.

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Number 3 BS-Alarm Tripper: "We will throw in a bunch "e-books" worth "thousands of dollars"

Generally speaking, nothing of value is ever given away free. This is an immutable law of the universe. But web "entrepreneurs" are always telling us they will throw in a valuable set of info products, worth thousands, if you just buy their $50 product.

Does this make sense? No it does not. These info products are usually available many other places for free. And the chances are you will download them and then forget about them completely. In fact the whole concept of the "valuable e-book" has been so corrupted by this practice that it devalues ALL e-books. Giving away worthless stuff is not necessarily a bad thing. But it tells me the seller is a hustler and cannot be trusted.

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