Have you ever seen those web sites, e-mails, or pop-up windows on the internet that start out something like this?

“Dear Mr./Mrs. Lucky McLuckerstein,

And then they almost always lead into this:

“Well, this is your lucky day, LUCKY, because I’ve selected you out of a thousand million BILLION applicants who have been denied access to my GAURUNTEED and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN METHOD of making life changing amounts of money with astounding simplicity and quickness, because I want to make sure such a powerful tool is only used by the right people. I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “Why me? I don’t recall applying for anything.” I am very selective about who I let into my kingdom of wealth; I only let those in who I know I can trust. I just so happen to have gone to school with your sister’s friend’s roommates’ Dad’s pen pal’s dog walker, so that practically makes us family, and I know I can trust family. With this trust I have carefully given to you, I will share with you my sure thing no way you can lose money making system. This is strictly a secret between you and me, and even mentioning my GAURUNTEED and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN METHOD of making so much money the earth will tilt in a different direction could cause devastating consequences to the world’s economic market and stability. The government itself is trying to stop me from giving away my secret because they don’t want the chaos that would ensue if every one in the world became as filthy, stinking rich as I am.

Cue in the pictures of happy looking people that read something like this,

“After using Love Money’s method of making money, I started seeing pure profit and cash come in the very day I signed up. In about a month I made a ton on money, literally. No, seriously, I had a pile of money in my backyard that weighed a metric ton. My bank called and said they couldn’t hold so much, so I had to start storing it in a warehouse I made in the back yard. My neighbors called the city ordinance on me. All of this within just a month of using Love Money’s money making method.” -Steve Steversinstein-finkles

Or even,

“Love Money’s money making method worked so well that I started seeing cash come into my bank account even before I knew about his system. I didn’t know where all the money was coming from, but then I got his personal e-mail and it all became clear. I was really confused for awhile there, but it just goes to show how good his method works.” – Ann Valtersmith-redenbacherson

And finally your gracious and zealous new best friend gets to the first and only reality of this entire escapade by stating something like,

“I can’t wait to share my secret with you and vacation together on our own cash bought islands; I call going to yours first! Ha ha, just kidding. There is just one small trifle you need to do in taking your first step towards unprecedented wealth. In order to securely and safely pass my information on to you, there is a small, one time fee of only $299.99. “Only $299.99?? Why so much?” you ask? By purchasing my GAURUNTEED and SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN METHOD of money making, you will receive my up to date and proven methods for working at home that will ensure your success within days, just read the testimonials!! Just think, this one small fee is the down payment for a lifetime of tremendous wealth. After a few months working with my system, it will seem like you paid a penny and got Fort Knox, except you’ll have even more money than that!! And you know what, just because I know I can trust you, I have just decided notified my operators that if you order within the next 10 minutes, I’ll throw in my patent pending toaster oven/ baby stroller, at absolutely no extra cost to you!! Click on the link below, and start the life you always wanted! Don’t wait any longer, there are limited supplies and they will be gone fast. Every second you don’t click that button is a second away from wealth! What are you waiting for, riches beyond your wildest dream are blah blah blah.”

Why such a long introduction? I admit, the example above is moderate compared to what real “work at home” and “get rich quick” web sites and e-mails will promise you. Yet the internet is overflowing with such promises and guarantees that many individuals, including myself, fall victim to every day. These scams do nothing more than prey upon the trusting nature of others, and I feel strongly about getting as much information as I can out to others before they make the same mistakes I did. In this hub, I would like to share with you my own experiences using and paying for the “work at home” web sites and other “get rich quick” ploys hoping to educate and warn people about the pitfalls of such web sites. I know that there are many of you out there who are in a similar situation now that I was in two years ago, a situation of seemingly desperate times were a quick money fix was a necessity for financial survival.

I had just finished my second year in graduate school and watched most of my classmates quit the program to get a job with the new lab skills they had acquired. I decided there was merit in finishing my degree, but the demands of being a student prevented me from being able to successfully sustain a part time job, much less a full time job. Money was getting extremely tight, so I turned to what I thought was the best resource for getting money, and getting it quick: the internet. Oh, how my eyes glazed over with the anticipation of using some of these systems to gain the money that I needed. I knew that it would take money to make money, so I decided to give this venture my absolute all and used a credit card that was all paid off, allowing myself a max spending of $800.00 as that was the credit card’s limit.

To clarify, I wasn’t taking part in these web site promises thinking that I would become a millionaire or believing that most of their systems actually worked. I’m an educated man with a strong head on my shoulders, and had a pretty good idea that they were all laced with unrealistic and fraudulent guarantees in some form or another. However, I did feel that I could perhaps manipulate some of the fast money schemes and get them to work for me; that is trying to get their own system to work against them. For example:

There are many web sites out there claiming that you can get paid filling out surveys. I went to a few, and signed up for three in particular. Two of them required a membership fee, the highest around $60.00 and the lowest around $24.00. Prior to joining the membership, both sites boasted surveys waiting to be taken that would pay $20.00. After joining the membership, the only surveys available to me on both web sites were only paying $1.00, and I could only do three surveys in one twenty four hour period. Upon further investigation as to where all the $20.00 surveys went, I found out that you had to fill out X number of surveys successfully before you were allowed access to the higher paying surveys. Furthermore, both of these sites reserved the right to withhold pay until your membership account surpassed $100.00 in earnings, and it’s likely that only once the $100.00 threshold is met will members be given the opportunity to fill out the higher paying surveys, if they do indeed exist. I cannot claim that such surveys don’t exist, as I didn’t pursue it for longer than three days, doing 9 total surveys at $1.00 a pop. Nor can I verify with any certainty the actual number of surveys required to be completed before getting the higher paid ones. Doing the math, I would have to wait longer than a month to reach the $100.00 pay mark, and I couldn’t wait that long.

What I can claim about the survey sites, however, is the more people you get to sign up, that is the more people you get to pay the membership and use you as a referral, you are told that you either get free stuff like mp3 players, get extra cash, or get to move up in membership faster and will be given access to higher paying surveys. However, I didn’t feel comfortable asking friends to pay up to $60.00 so that I can get paid $5.00 per survey instead of $1.00 per survey. What you should watch out for are random people you don’t know contacting you via networking websites where they can comment to the general public on your profile, excitedly explaining how much money they’re making filling out surveys. As survey web sites explain, the highest paid surveys are always the “rarest” and get taken up quickly, so it doesn’t make any sense for a high ranking member to tell the world about these surveys as he/she would want to keep them for his/her self. Thus adding to the survey sites scheme of getting the highest amount of people possible to pay for a membership, then those individuals finding out money can’t really be made by taking the surveys, and then getting those people to rope other people into paying the membership in order to get something out of it. But of course you need to bring in X amount of people before the benefits are seen.

The third site promising to pay me for filling out surveys did actually have $20.00 to $30.00 surveys available to me with the added bonus of having no membership fee. I finally felt as if I had found something, however, such was not the case. The “paid surveys” were actually a series of 4 to 5 questions asking me my age, sex, work experience, hobbies, and things of that nature. After finishing these questions, I was either told that no surveys were available at that time, or I was connected to the survey’s “sponsoring” web sites, not surprisingly the sponsor offers were geared towards the answers I gave to the survey questions. Once there, I was informed that in order to get paid for taking the survey, I needed to sign up for a total of 5 or 6 of the sponsor’s offers, as that is how the survey gets money to pay for the surveys taken. I tried to click on as many of the free sponsor offers as possible, but in the end I couldn’t get away with not spending any money and my net profit was usually around $3.00- $5.00. Adding to the headache, even the free offer’s required my credit card number, as I would be charged every month after the first free month if I forgot to cancel the order.

Even then, I still thought I had found a loophole in their system. I figured I could order the required offers, keep track of every sponsor’s phone number for cancellation, and still appear to have taken part in the offers and get paid by the surveys. Upon going through this process of completing numerous offers and then canceling the order later in the day, I noticed that while my account balance for the paid surveys was sky-rocketing, there was a little star next to my balance that read “payment pending.” I called the survey web site hotline and asked what payment pending meant, and the operator told me that surveys are only paid out when they received a payment conformation from their sponsors. I told her that I had completed all the required offers, paid for by credit card, and she politely informed me that I had canceled the offers and therefore payment had not taken place. Someone had figured out my ruse, and I defiantly wasn’t giving them the credit they deserved. So I gave up on the paid surveys approach to quick money, and looked elsewhere into the unlimited resources the internet had to provide for my quick money need.

At all the paid survey sites I explored, there were also various links towards data entry positions. This felt a little more legit than the paid surveys, not much mind you, but enough for me to look into it. I went to a few data entry sites, they are all pretty much the same, and chose the cheapest membership to join and paid around $35.00. The name itself is misleading, and advertisers for memberships to data entry rely on that. Looking at their web sites, they allude, while never actually saying, that all you have to do is receive the data sent to you by various companies, simply enter the data given, and bing bang boom you get paid. While this is technically true, it doesn’t happen in the way they make it sound. Data entry is when businesses and companies, like law offices or hospitals, need to transfer a hard copy, hand written bill’s information into computer format. Once entered into the computer, all information is legally saved and sent to the client for payment collection. There is no such thing, to the best of my knowledge and I may be wrong, as any data entry opportunities where data is sent from one computer to your computer and you copy and paste the information from one format to another as the data entry web sites will have you believe. My $35.00 membership got me nothing more than links to other web sites that gave me more information about data entry possibilities. The links from the membership did include jobs for data entry positions; however the ones I found required having taken data entry classes at a tech school or some other kind of formal training. Data entry is an actual paying job, but I could not find any links where I could start right away. In fact, most if not all the data entry employment opportunities required me to fill out an application for their company. I’m sure that data entry could be a way to make income on the side or as a job you could do at home, however I couldn’t find any way to instantly do it without applying or taking some sort of class. It may be out there, but I couldn’t find it.

My next stop towards riches was the “work at home and make millions” web sites. One that peeked my interest, if anything just out of curiosity, was a site claiming that you could get paid stuffing and sending out envelops which they provided you with, even including postage. They went as far as to promise that I could make up to $1,500.00 a week, with minimum earnings around $500.00. They didn’t ask for any money on the site, and gave a phone number to call to so you could receive your envelopes and get stuffing. I called the number and an answering machine clicked on. It asked me to leave a name and address, and more importantly stated that only serious individuals need apply, and to ensure that only serious individuals apply there is a $45.00 fee. The fee was set up to give them confidence that you will send out the materials they send to you. I received information from them in the mail a day or two later, and it was nothing more that a request to send a check for $45.00 to so and so, and upon receiving payment a booklet containing information on how to make money from home will be sent to me. This is one enterprise that I decided not to pursue, and upon further investigation I was lucky to do so. Looking to the internet again, I researched any information about the envelope stuffing opportunity to see if anyone had paid the $45.00, and it turned out many had. After paying, they received a letter in the mail essentially telling them the way to make money from home was to set up an informational letterhead that required people to pay money first and then send the money making information to them second. Nothing more than making the fake envelope stuffing opportunity seem real to people, charging them money, and then telling them to do the same thing to other people.

At this point I was fed up with the whole thing, so many empty promises being thrown at me with nothing to show for it except falling deeper in debt. But I didn’t give up, there had to be some way to use their own promises against them. Wrong again.

This time I went to a real estate get rich quick site, one saying that if I used his trade secret system in real estate I would see returns bigger than I could imagine. I had to pay a membership fee to receive his informational package, only this time his information could be sent instantly via the internet thus not having to wait for it in the mail. I thought I could research his trade secret, but nothing came up, so I paid somewhere around $100.00 to get his secret information. I could only access the information sent to me when signed into the web site, ruling out the possibility to download it on my computer to show to others. Furthermore, it was quite clear that any attempt to show his information to someone who hasn’t paid him is in clear violation of the terms and agreement you signed when joining the membership and he could sue you to the laws fullest extent. The information was nothing more than links to public domain web sites that showed houses being foreclosed by the government and selling at cheap rates; sites that are available to the public but I guess most don’t know they exist. I suppose it did have some worth by informing me of where to buy cheap houses, but investment in those houses were needed as most of them were run down. Not worth the $100.00 I spent, and definitely did not have any quick return.

After that I called it quits. Further in debt, and the more I read the “work at home to get rich quick” or any other get rich quick opportunities, they all started to look as ridiculous as the introduction to this hub sounds. The allure of such easy money is appealing to anybody, but strip away all the promises and guarantees from the “easy money” web sites and they nothing more than,

“I’m a perfect stranger and have an idea, an idea that could be about anything. It could be about growing bluish orange dinosaurs in your back yard. It could be about eating paper. You have no way of knowing anything about what my ‘proven system’ in making money entails, as all I have told you is that it is a ‘proven system.’ Give me your money.”

I’m sure that these systems have worked for somebody, but if they did I can almost say with 100% confidence that they had enough capital to make it work and that it was not quick or easy. Of course I can’t say that with 100% certainty because, like I said, I’m sure it works once in a blue moon. The real individuals getting rich are the ones putting up the web sites and offering solutions to all your problems for a mere membership fee, usually more than $100.00. Want to make money quick, here, I’ll tell you for free. Set up a web site proclaiming wealth and riches, charge 300 bucks, get paid, send them an e-mail or letter telling to them the secret is in making a web site promising something that people will buy into. Heck, I bet you could even put a web site out there promising nothing but asking for a membership fee anyway. Some people are just curious.

There, I saved you $299.99.