Whale Speak » fakes http://tamewhale.com/whalespeak Infrequent & Opinionated Web Farts Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:46:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 How to spot an internet scam http://tamewhale.com/whalespeak/2008/08/how-to-spot-an-internet-scam/ http://tamewhale.com/whalespeak/2008/08/how-to-spot-an-internet-scam/#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:30:55 +0000 Gavin http://tamewhale.com/whalespeak/?p=72 I feel like the guys in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink that could just look at a supposedly 3,000 year-old statue and say “fake”. But I’m beginning to see that there are a lot of people still falling for fake promises made by websites.

Here’s a quick test that helps me when I have any doubt: go to Google, type in the url of the website (like internetscam.com for example) and look at the results.

People who claim to be big players can be found out very easily with this method. Not a lot of results? Probably haven’t been around too long.

Are all the results directory listings or otherwise neutral? Are they all ads? They’ve probably done some SEO but still not a definitive result.

The jackpot is really blog and forum results where somebody writes quite clearly “so-and-so is a rip off” or even “so-and-so is legitimate”. Look for real people giving real reviews and unsolicited feedback.

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