DREAM MERCHANTS

"Hook and Steer" or "Bait and Switch"

With the unemployment rate being so high these days, more and more people are falling victim to online, work at home, schemes. I have a name for the people who profit from the false hopes they advertise on the Internet; I call these scoundrels

"Dream Merchants." I call them Dream Merchants because they are selling a dream and that dream is usually the possibility of working from home or some other ridiculous scheme that never pays off. You used to be able to spot these heartless people's advertisements in the backs of tabloid newspapers and magazines. Now the Internet is flooded with them. It has gotten so bad that these scam, work from home campaigns are making videos on sites like YouTube and other well known online video companies. The latest twist is for these companies to give you a certain amount of space on their server for your website or Blog for an affiliate program or your own site where they will pay you to run their advertisements. Once you have your site built or they build one for you, you quickly discover that you are not making any money. Then you start to research why you cannot seem to get any traffic to your website. You will invariably start searching for your companies name with the word "scam" also in the search engine. You quickly find out that there are sites offering to answer your question, "Is the company in question a scam?"

You quickly discover that the company posting the possibility that the companies work at home plan you have is a scam and you will need to either switch over to their plan or pay for an upgraded plan to make the really big money. If you are smart you realize that you have just been a victim of the illegal "Hook and Steer" sales strategy, or the "Bait and Switch." Whatever you want to call it, it is illegal, but like most laws meant to protect the general public these days, there is very little you can really do about the parasites on the Internet who actually think it is cool to con people out of what little money they have left. This is the same mentality you see in call centers where telemarketers work. My advice is to proceed with extreme caution. As long as you are not paying these companies any money at all, I say go for the free web space for your Blog or website, post a few advertisements for pay, but never do the upgrade. Also, never get tangled up in trying to figure which video to believe when people are showing you their account information to convince you of how much money they have made. Many of these videos are part of the scam and the information you see is easily produced explicitly for the purpose of giving their scam credibility and milking you out of more money.

Copyright

©

2009

C. C. Turner