Don't Fall for Old Tricks, New Means with Online Money Scams

In the good old days of "pyramid schemes" and "multilevel marketing," it was hard to get people to attend the meetings in person, cash in hand, to get on board the get-rich-quick bandwagon.

Same goes for legal gambling as it began to creep out from under the giant rock known as Las Vegas and infiltrate middle America (I note there is a "card room" next door to my relative's house in Spokane, Wash., that is embedded in a bowling alley that offers not only poker but table games. Perfectly legal and not even part of an Indian tribe).

But now with the Internet the scams are back in a big way.

The reason why these "chain letter" types of operations work is that the Internet is a vast connective body and that it is possible to reach millions of potential suckers with a few keystrokes and a mouse click. But to earn that "$100 per day" or "$1,000 per week," you have to be near the top of a pyramid that has touched thousands and thousands of people and you are, in reality, getting only pennies per head.

Google Adsense and similar ventures have gone far in filtering out this fraud, with their strict click rules and other guidelines. When the cockroaches who sign on to Adsense with fraud in mind start out in that path, they are red-flagged and eliminated (if I am ever suspended by Adsense, even though I have done nothing that goes against Google's terms of service, I would be sad, but realize that many hundreds of other true jerks are being hammered at the same time).

The new shakedown is that every blogging-for-pay site, including this one, has its share of scam artists, openly abusive spammers and the like. Usually the inner membership self-polices each site, but slip-ups do occur and a gang from Latvia or Nigeria will drain the bank accounts of a sizeable number of suckers looking for a quick buck.

Tracing illegal activity is marvelously easy for the Internet police, but actually catching and prosecuting violators in the Ukraine or the Philippines is problematic.

The moral of all this? Be happy with your Adsense pennies and an occasional $5 from PayPal. Just rest assured that small sum in legit -- and just work harder to multiply that effort. Like the old tale of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady far supercedes fast and careless.

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