Cash for Clunkers Scams Abound
Aug/091
As the Senate debates an extension of the cash for clunkers program, public awareness of cash for clunkers is at its peak.
That is why law enforcement has been warning since late last week that people should be alert to cash for clunkers scams.
Several state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission have issued statements warning about web sites that claim to allow consumers to pre-register for the cash for clunkers program. The registration forms on some of these sites ask for Social Security numbers and other personal information.
Cars.gov, operated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is the only web site affiliated with the cash for clunkers program. And no pre-registration is required for consumers to participate.
The other sites, that claim to be taking pre-registration, are likely to be controlled by identity thieves and other fraudsters, according to the FTC.
The Afflicter did a quick search for some scam cash for clunkers sites and didn’t immediately find any. They appear not to be ranking highly in Google search results.
In case anyone is still confused by one of these sites, it’s worth noting that Cash for Clunkers is not the official name of the program. Cars.gov refers to the program as the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS.
For those who haven’t been following it, CARS or cash for clunkers, is providing credits of up to $4,500 for consumers who trade in gas guzzling cars for more fuel efficient ones. The program, which started last month, is on pace to soon burn through its initial $1 billion in funding. The Senate is debating adding another $2 billion.
Internet Spades Site Spadester May be a Bad Bet
Jul/093
The Afflicter wasn’t very familiar with the card game called spades, so we were surprised to find in our research how many people were looking for a game of spades online.
There are 60,500 searches a month on the keywords “spades online,” according to estimates from research tools that Google offers. Another 18,100 are estimated to be searching the term “internet spades.”
So one would think that people who run Spadester.com should be able to do a good honest business, offering games of spades online. Especially with the opportunity to wager. (The site purports to be based in Cyprus.)
But many people who say they are former customers of Spadester.com are warning others away. There are discussion threads in numerous forums and posts in a number of blogs, going back for months, warning that Spadester is a scam.
Many of these warnings describe similar experiences with Spadester: Upon signing up, the customer plays some spades, wins a little and cashes out their winnings; Their initial experience gives them confidence that the site is not a scam.
They then play more aggressively, win and end up with hundreds or thousands of dollars in their account. But this time, when they request to cash out, Spadester is unresponsive, citing technical reasons for not being able to immediately make the payout.
Then Spadester tells the customer that they can have their money if they make a new deposit, of a couple hundred bucks or so, in the Spadester account.
Sometimes, Spadester staff become aggressive and threaten to close customers’ accounts and not pay them at all.
Customers who decline to make a new deposit may eventually be told that they can have their payout but they first must verify their identities by providing a Social Security number.
This last tactic has lead some to speculate that Spadester is not only ripping off its customers by refusing to pay winners, but that it also may be harvesting personal information to sell to identity thieves:
To see some of the discussions of this check out: World Law Direct, Rip-off Report and Scam.com.
Afflicter believes that there are some online gambling sites that are offering honest games, but we recommend that you should be very careful of who you’re dealing with if you gamble online.
In the offline gambling world, casino operators are heavily regulated. In major gambling destinations like Nevada and Atlantic City, N.J., casino operators who cheat run the risk of losing their operating licenses or being charged by regulators with heavy fines.
But on the Internet, a casino operator may be very hard to find or identify, and may not bear any consequence for cheating.
You should also be skeptical of reviews you read of gambling sites. Many of them are likely to be posted by affiliate marketers who earn commissions for bringing new gamblers. We suspect for example that it was an affiliate marketer who posted this:
Spread Group Looks Like Work at Home Scam
Jul/091
The business venture that refers to itself as Spread Group Inc. appears to be a very creative work at home scam.
Spread Group first came to the Afflicter’s attention last week in a post on the Scam.com forum, where someone reported getting the Spread Group’s pitch via email.
According to the company’s web site, Spread Group is looking for “financial agents.” These agents, Spread Group claims, are paid $2,300 a month plus commissions for work they can do from home for only two hours a day.
The Financial Agents’ specific duties aren’t laid out very clearly on the web site, however. They are apparently described in more detail in email to prospective agents, such as the one who reported their experience to scam.com:
“I e-mailed this guy back and asked what exactly it was that I was to do for this 2300 a month and he responded that I would have to have a bank account (red flag #1), that I would have to have the money transferred into my bank account and withdraw it on the same day and then go to Western Union and wire it to the company and I would collect 5 to 8% commission for each transaction, but that the wire fee would have to come out of my commission. According to this guy who e-mailed me back the reason why I have to use MY bank account is because it’s faster for the people transferring money into my account to get payment to this guy’s company.”
This sounds an awful lot like what is known as advance fee fraud. There are a million variations on the advance fee scam, the best known of which tend to involve Nigerian princes. But what they all have in common is that they involve a victim who is persuaded to send money to the scammer.
Spread Group looks an awful lot like the check-cashing version of the advance fee scam. In this take, the victim receives a check and deposits it before wiring money on to the scammer. After the scammer receives their money, the scamee find that the check they deposited was no good.
Now, to be sure, it could be possible that there is some other reason that Spread Group is asking people to deposit money in their accounts and wire it on to other accounts. (We emailed Spread Group to ask, but they didn’t respond.) But there is plenty on Spread Group’s web site to be suspicious of.
In rather broken English, Spread Group characterizes itself as sophisticated high-finance company. “Our company is among top 5 financial corporations in the stock market providing the widest possible range of services of all kinds.” This written by a company that claims to have 3,000 employees and to be based in Glen Falls, N.Y.
Spread Group invokes the financial market angle to explain its intent to shuffle money through its financial agents’ personal bank accounts. In somewhat vague and English-language-challenged terms, the company seems to say that this is a quicker way to transfer investors’ money.
“As we cater for securities, investments and brokerage services, provision for high expediency of payment operations and possibility to offer instant transfers to our system have become our highest priority tasks,” Spread Group says. Just transferring money directly, Spread Group says, sometimes causes delays, “which is not admissible in the securities market, where fluctuations might happen very often.”
The U.S. Secret Service says that if you’ve lost a large amount of money to an advance fee fraud, you should report it to your local Secret Service field office.
Here’s a news segment that ABC News did about advance fee scams run from Nigeria in 2006:
FTC Is Cracking Down on Business Opportunity Fraud
Jul/090
The Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Google Money Tree was one of nine suits the FTC announced on July 1, all against fraudulent “business opportunities.” With so many people feeling desperate about their finances, more people are vulnerable to get-rich-quick business scams.
The FTC also posted this interview on its website with a former perpetrator of business opportunity scams, explaining how they often work:
Work From Home Opportunites, Work From Home Scams
Jul/091
Advertisements for so-called “work-from-home” opportunities are increasingly ubiquitous, and rip-offs based around these “opportunities” are among the fastest growing type of scams.
The Federal Trade Commission brought a lawsuit this week against one such business, known as Google Money Tree, which purported to tell its customers how to make money by filling out forms and doing Internet searches. Those who signed up were asked for bank account information, according to the FTC. The customers were then billed a $72.21 monthly membership fee that wasn’t previously disclosed, according to the lawsuit.
There appear to be hundreds of other work-from-home scams out there. Their appeal is obvious: everyone is worried about making ends meet and there are few real opportunities for the unemployed or underemployed.
But we wonder if, as many of these scams are exposed, if another point isn’t going to be missed by much of the public: along with all of the scams, there are also some real businesses establishing themselves that offer people the opportunity to work from home.
None of them will make you rich, the way scammers claim to be able to. And all of them require some skills beyond filling out forms or searching the Internet.
The most opportunities seem to involve providing content for the thousands of new websites that are springing up.
Businesses like Associated Content and ehow.com offer the opportunity to work as a writer or videographer, providing content for other people’s web sites. The pay is lower than what established writers working through more traditional channels get, and a person certainly couldn’t make a living off these sites. But they do, in fact, offer the opportunity for a person to work from home, on their own hours and at their own pace, without even the hassles that traditional freelance writers contend with of finding and dealing with clients.
The editor of afflicter.com has even done some work for these sites, as well ad Demand Studios and constant-content.com (my own affiliate link here) and found them to be not a bad way to make a few extra dollars in your spare time.
Again, the work they offer is harder than filling out forms, and isn’t enough to make a living. But they do in fact offer the opportunity to do real work, for a little bit of real money, from home.
As for the scams, here’s a good overview of how Google Money Tree worked, as posted on youtube by Reviewaroo.com:
