“The RoseBouquet”

I’ve been online since early 1999, and I’ve come through many stages of learning what to do and what to watch out for. Sometimes I get to feeling that everyone else must know what I know because at the beginning I was sure everyone else knew far more than I did. That is not so any more, and once in a while I get a wake up when I see that someone has fallen for a scam that would never occur to me - now.

It seems wise then to review some basic guidelines so that you don’t get “fleeced” if you have not been warned and fall for some lies.

You may already know that to avoid mail theft, you simply have your government checks directly deposited into your account. Online you can take similar precautions with your email address. I am convinced there are people out there who deliberately start one of those cute or inspirational “Forwards” that they send to all their friends and contacts, and ask to pass it on. They know that few know about hiding the email addresses of their contact list, so eventually it will come back to them, and they can harvest a whole bunch of addresses for their more serious sp-amm-ing emails. At the very least, learn to use Blind-Carbon-Copy (Bcc) in your email program if you MUST mail to a whole bunch of people at one time. But I highly recommend making a personal policy of NOT forwarding those emails.

It doesn’t take long, after you start surfing around and visiting various websites, and getting emails from strangers, that you hear about these fantastic opportunities to make money. All you do is fork over so and so much money, and then it will all happen for you. I still blush when I think how I fell for a chance to make $30,000 in 90 days. Fortunately I was too poor to pay for the advanced package. I learned on a lot of free programs. I thank God now for keeping me poor through those early years.

If your intuition tells you there must be a flaw with this idea, then there likely is. I suggest you put the idea on ice for a while, and go do some online research. Put that company or program’s name into Google or one of the search engines, and read everything you can find that mentions them, including the posts on forums where others ask about them and more experienced people will give cautions or warnings depending on what has happened to them.

Recently I met a woman who had paid over $1000 to join a program that would give her some websites with affiliate programs, which should bring her a good income. She asked me to look it over, as it had only made her $18 and she was feeling nervous. When I saw their plan I gasped. They had charged her that much money for something she could do for free on the internet?! Oh-my-no!

Anyone can sign up as an Amazon affiliate for free and put links on your site to sell their products. Pretty well, any affiliate program that charges you to sign up is a fraud. What this company didn’t tell her, after some phone calls to pressure her to buy, was that now she was expected to promote those generic sites, and hope that visitors would click on those affiliate links and go buy in droves. If she claimed not to know how to do that, they charged her again and again for free classified ads!

I felt sick for her as I explained that it is possible to get a domain name at GoDaddy.com for under $10 and someone like me can give her hosting at just $12/year. Then shes can learn to put on a website, and free affiliate links, and learn to market her site in a professional manner just like the rest of us. It will take time, but in the end, it works.

Naturally, I added that I’m learning how building a SiteBuildIt! (SBI) site offers video training and helps one learn to do that in just a few months. That really shortens the learning curve. I’m rather excited about my discoveries in that regard the last few months.

Learning to do sound research online is one of the best things you can do to protect yourself, but if my word has any weight with you, here’s a few other scams to pass on the other side of the cyber-street;

- avoid like the plague those emails from someone in Africa begging for help to transfer money (known as Nigerian Scams). DELETE!

- avoid offers of quick and easy get-rich jobs or schemes

- be wary of phony Identity Theft Protection or Credit Repair Scams

- flee from “You’ve Won a Prize!” Lottery Scam

- be careful of Auction Fraud (eBay and Yahoo Auctions) where you pay but they don’t send

- never give in to anyone who insists you must decide right now! They are afraid you’ll find out about them.

- would you ask strangers to help you with large sums of money? Something is fishy when someone chooses you, from around the globe, to help them with millions of dollars. Don’t fall for the trap!

One thing I found helpful was to sign up for someone’s regular ezine for a while to get to know them better, however, even then, don’t use your good regular email address. Get a free disposable one online, and use that to sign up. If this site owner starts sending you emails far too frequently, insisting you must buy this or that, you want to be able to get of them, and if they won’t stop when you unsubscribe, you want to abandon that email address, without having to start over with all your other safe friends and relatives.

Most are quite ethical about not mailing to you when you unsubscribe, but some of them share their mailing list with others, so you could start getting emails from people you never heard of before. Bad news if you used your good primary email address.

Don’t let fear tie you in knots. Just learn to say “NO” until you can research and find out if a deal is safe and good for you. Wise King Solomon said (in Proverbs) that there is safety in getting lots of advice before deciding anything. God is very interested in your online ventures too; and He’s fully informed!