Here are some more “scammy” earning opportunities that you will find online. Learn how to recognize and avoid them.

Payment processor / Money transfer agent.

This is actually a very big scam that can cause you to lose a lot of money and also get into trouble with authorities. It works like this: you are contacted by someone claiming to have a company in a foreign country where it is difficult for them to accept payments from customers in America or Europe. They offer you a job where you will receive payments from their clients in the form or checks or money transfers. You will then deduct your commission and forward the rest of the payment to the company that hired you via a money transfer service such as Western Union.

The problem is: there are no “clients”. The checks they send you are either stolen or forgeries. The electronic money transfers you receive come from accounts that were hacked. What will happen is that all the transactions you processed for the “company” (which doesn’t exist) will be reversed, leaving you out of your money. You will probably also have to explain to the authorities as to why you were receiving fraudulent funds.

Shipping agent.

Same scam than above, but with a twist. You will be receiving merchandise for a “company” and then forwarding it to some third world country. Items ordered are often electronics, jewelry, or industrial equipment, basically high value items that can be resold easily. They say they will pay you for each item that you ship to them. Problem is, all of that merchandise was paid for with fraudulent funds. You are quite likely to get in trouble with authorities here again. This scam is often run by the same people who run the payment processor scam as well.

Cash gifting.

The exact way this scheme operates varies. However, in general it works this way: you are told that you can make plenty of money by sending cash “gifts” to people. It all comes down to this: it’s basically a pyramid scheme. For example, you are told that you can make $500 by having 5 people send you $100 each. Then, these people get 5 people each to send them $100 and so on and so forth. Eventually, the scheme collapses as there will come a time where there won’t be enough people in the world left to sign up. The only people that will have made money are those who started the scheme and are at the top, while pretty much everyone below them will lose. This form of “business” is also banned in most jurisdictions, no matter what the promoters say that it is completely “legal and legitimate”. It’s simply not.

If you want to be the owner of your own CPA rebill/trial offer, there is one more thing that you need: a payment processor which will bill the customers. Obviously, anyone who runs any type of e-commerce site needs one. However, the business model behind a rebill offer will require that you put in a lot of effort into selecting a good payment processor. Let me explain:

Most (probably all) payment processing companies and financial institutions in the United States will not want to touch you with a ten yard stick if you run this kind of site. So you can pretty much forget about going to your local bank and asking for a merchant account. They won’t approve you. Or if they do, you will get shut down way before you even get your first check from them. Why is that? After all, what your site is selling is perfectly legal, right? And so is running a membership site that automatically bills the customer after the trial period is done.

Even with that, you will get plenty of fraudulent transactions and chargebacks. Wondering why the fraud rates for these sites are so high? After all, it’s not like you are selling high end electronics or jewelry…

The reality is that free trial sites are often used by fraudsters. But not for the product, which they don’t care about anyways. They use these sites to test if a stolen card is valid and can be used online. Problem is, they of course won’t bother to cancel the trial, since after all, it’s not their card. You then bill the card the regular rate. When the cardholder receives their bill, they then realize that something fishy is going on and report the fraud.

Chargebacks will be another major concern to you. Even though you must put clearly readable text on your site which states that the user will be charged (and the amount) after the (7 day/14 day/etc) trial period and the user should have paid attention to it, you will still get people who don’t cancel and then get surprised when they get billed. Either they weren’t paying attention when they were ordering, or forgot to cancel and now don’t want to pay. What they do next is contact their financial institution and claim that they never authorized the charge coming from your site, resulting in a chargeback.

Due to all these reasons, you need to have what is called a “high risk merchant account.” These are the same types of merchant accounts often used by various online businesses such as adult sites and gambling sites. The merchant accounts are issued by an offshore bank, usually based in a European or Latin American country. You can find plenty of high risk merchant account providers simply by doing a quick Google search. You can also ask for advice on various forums dedicated to online business, or more specifically to payment processing, in order to determine which payment processor is the best to deal with. It is also a great idea to have a backup account issued by a different processor should there be an issue with your main one.

Website for sale

Having an electronics business is a great business. Many searches a day are looking for electronic items whether they be ipods, gadgets, tvs, computers, games consoles, etc which is why having an electronics affiliate website linked into Amazon can be a very profitable income if you can market the site correclty and drive traffic to the site. We currently have a number of websites for sale that are linked in with many different affiliate merchants that can make you nice income from the daily searches a day that are put on the major search engines