I’ve posted in the past about the Google Money and related scams. Now I’m reading on Marketing Pilgrim that they’re finally suing the scammers for using the Google name.

It’s a kind of interesting situation since they don’t yet have the names for all of the defendants. That’s one of the challenges of the internet, of course. Scams thrive because they can be done anonymously.

Google’s doing what they can. They’re permanently disabling associated AdWords accounts in general that provide a poor user experience. But it’s challenging because it’s so easy to pop up under a new name when you’re online.

These are the names Google says to be aware of now:

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

They know quite well that more names will appear; that’s the nature of this kind of scum.

It’s kind of a pity to see the name Google Cash up there, as there was also a legitimate product by that name, made by Chris Carpenter. But now the scammers have used it too.

As always, remember that no product can guarantee you riches or any degree of success. If they’re making wild promises, just don’t believe it.

There are products that can help you along the path to building a real business, but there are still a lot of factors that may keep you from succeeding, allow you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, just let you earn a little extra spending cash or anything in between. It’s mostly up to you. The information just helps.

I’ve posted a bit about the Google Money and similar scams. Today I saw that Google has also posted their take on these scams.

It’s some good tips, although as usual the people who most need to read it will probably never see it. But they do go over the legitimate ways you can earn money from Google (AdSense and the Google Affiliate Network), plus some of the symptoms of these and other scams people try using Google’s name.

I particularly liked this section:

Some sales pitches use the word “Google” or other trademarks right in their name with targeted phrases like “cash,” “pay day,” “money,” “secrets,” “home business,” etc. If you can’t find it on our list of Google products or on the business solutions page, don’t trust it.

A great point for anyone facing any product making big claims while using some other company’s name.

I posted a while back about the Google Money scams. They’ve been all over the place, heavily advertised through AdWords, presenting itself as fake blogs and fake newspaper stories. Google finally did something about it, at least the parts that go through their site.

They terminated the AdWords accounts of those advertising them.

Not just suspended or deleted the ad campaigns. According to Search Engine Watch, they deleted the accounts and informed the account holders that they cannot open new ones. Period.

They mean business this time!

But don’t you worry! If you need big money promises, similar programs claiming you can make big bucks through Twitter are now out there, according to the L.A. Times.

Usual routine, you too can earn hundreds of dollars with little effort. Tons of Twitter followers! Big money! Easy!

Just pay a little money for shipping and handling. Oh, and even more per month, but that’s deep in the terms and conditions. You might not even notice until it shows up on your credit card.

These kinds of programs walk a very fine line on legitimacy. While they technically do list all charges, they’re often hard to find. In addition, the claims are pretty hard to believe for the simple reason that they aren’t likely.

Sure, some people do make good money with Google or with Twitter. Most people, even with instructions on what the other guy is doing… won’t. That’s business for you.

These companies can be deceptive about where they’re located and/or make it very difficult to cancel your subscription and get your money back when you find out what you’re being charged. They aren’t always on the wrong side of the law, but they’re often not far from the edge.

If you want to make money advertising on Google, study pay per click advertising. Perry Marshall is a reputable source.

Making money on Twitter can be more difficult, in part because it’s newer territory and there are fewer guides with a proven history. There are plenty of tricks to building a big following, but pick the wrong one and your account gets banned. Or just appear too spammy and see what happens.

Building a loyal following that cares enough about what you have to say in a tweet and will buy from links you post is an entirely different challenge.

It comes down to the simple truth that there is no easy solution to make big money for most of us. Sometimes someone will hit it lucky, but the next person to do what appears to be the same thing may not succeed. If it were that easy we’d all be earning the big bucks.

Researching an online home business is tough these days. It’s not just the ever present scams, it’s detecting them as those who promote them get smarter about how you research opportunities.

The big example is that searching for the opportunity or ebook name plus “scam” is often taken up by people promoting the opportunity. They’ve come to realize that this is a big term people use to check them out, so they try to claim it for themselves on the positive side of things.

These “reviews” can be hard to tell from the real thing. However, if you see a review of an opportunity or ebook starting out with something along the lines of “Is (opportunity) a Scam?” and then go into a glowing review of how it’s not a scam, be wary. Be doubly wary if all they have to say is positive. Just about any opportunity is going to have some negatives. A good review should note these.

Be even more wary if you see more or less the same review on site after site. Odds are it was provided by the business itself and the affiliates or promoters were too lazy to change it for their own sites.

So Where Are the Real Reviews??

Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? And it’s not easy to do sometimes.

Persistence is your #1 tool. Search on the business name. Use the name plus review. Use the name plus scam.

Check the testimonials on the site and see if you can contact the people giving the testimonials. If they have domain names with their testimonials you may be able to find a way to contact them on your own.

A lot of the big launches have big name marketers giving testimonials. That’s nice, but to me it doesn’t prove much of anything. A person who has been having success for a long time is going to see things quite differently from someone just starting out, and what they like may not be as useful to you if you don’t have the background knowledge yet.

Check their contact information and whois. Contact email addresses should be related to their business website in most cases. If you own your domain name, this is easy and comes with the hosting. Whois information can be kept private, but if it shows names and contact information it must be honest.

Read all the fine print, privacy policy, terms of service and so forth. Some sites don’t make it nearly clear enough that there’s a monthly expense for the information or opportunity. You need to know what your real expenses will be.

Try to figure out how it is you will be earning money. Mistrust any opportunity where either that’s not clear or you realize that you’re earning for recruiting rather than selling, especially if you only earn for recruiting.

Check Ripoff Report. Check scam.com. You can even check with the BBB, but honestly they have their problems as a resource.

Be wary if the site looks like a newspaper review of the business opportunity. That’s a popular way to present some programs just now, but they really are not news stories. Take a good look and you will realize that pretty much everything clickable on these sites relates to the opportunity being presented.

Ask on any work at home forums you know, such as the one here.

Think about if you can really afford to risk the money. No matter how good the opportunity, even when it is legitimate, you face the risk of failure. Not every person will succeed in any particular business. Sometimes it’s not a good match; other times it’s a scam. Either way, be sure that you can afford the risk.

Will This Guarantee That You Don’t Get Scammed?

Sorry, no, can’t promise you that. But you can cut down the odds that you’ll be scammed, which is a great place to start.

Always remember, be skeptical. Know the difference between home businesses and work at home jobs. Know what’s likely and what’s improbable. Ask questions. Do your due diligence. You are the one responsible for your decision in the long run.

And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

I earn some pretty decent money from home most months (well, except last month, which was pathetic, ouch!). A fair bit of it comes from Google AdSense, which can be a pretty good program or a really lousy earner, depending on a lot of factors. That’s why all these ads proclaiming “Google Pays Me $(large amount of money) Per Day/Week/Whatever” drive me nuts.

I know it’s not that simple. But I had to look at the program’s page, just to see what’s going on with it.

Nope, not going to buy it. I really don’t like the looks of it.

First of all, make sure you look at lots of these ads and the sites they lead to. Yes, sites, plural, as each ad will lead to a different site. They’re all the same, just with different names and your city automatically entered into it by a script. Sometimes you’ll even see the same photos appear under different names. There are hundreds of these sites out there, apparently.

Some details they have flat wrong. They’re talking about checks from Google, then they say pay is weekly. Wrong. Google pays monthly. Then they even say the first check should be on its way within 48 hours. Someone is seriously mixed up here.

Google isn’t paying you as such for the links you post either. You’re getting paid when people click on those links, and you’d better not expect $5-$30 per click. Individual ads may eventually add up to that, but getting paid that high on a single click is quite rare.

They’re promoting two programs. Nope, not going to link them. Both are what are called forced continuity programs.

They may offer their products on either a free trial basis or for a small fee, say $3. However, you have 7 days from the time you order to cancel, or you get hit with a larger fee, which recurs monthly. They do have this listed in the Terms and Conditions, which is why it always pays to read these things. They’re sending a physical product by mail in this case, so 7 days after you place your order is hardly any time at all.

Their sites also mention being talked about on various news sources.

Know what? I never trust that if you haven’t linked to the story about your business so I can read it for myself. If a major news site referenced my business in a positive way, you’d better believe I’d be linking.

The “blog” pages promoting this have a variety of comments at the end, but if you take a look at least some of the comments will be the same. Comments are disabled due to spam. I guess the poor folks never heard of Akismet.

They also show all these wonderful pictures and tell a great story of rapid progress to amazing earnings.

I don’t care if it’s the best system on the planet. Most people will not be able to achieve such earnings. Doubly so in such a short time. It’s an ugly truth that most home businesses fail. Some people will do amazingly well, more will do adequately, but for a wide range of reasons many people just won’t succeed at all.

Not to mention, most are nearly impossible to cancel. They don’t want you to be able to cancel easily, after all.

These sites that call themselves “Google (something or other)” are almost exclusively scams. It takes time to take them down, but almost nothing to put one up, which is why they will likely continue to pop up under a variety of names.

Yes, they will give you some information on how to start a home business earning money through AdSense. But with the quality of information on the sales page, I have a lot of doubts as to the quality of the rest of it.

These sites are so common right now that Google has even seen fit to comment on it in the AdSense blog, noting that they aren’t associated and you don’t have to pay anyone to join AdSense.

There’s a fascinating and very long thread on Scam.com about a very, very similar offer. Make sure you read the last few pages as well as the early parts. Things were good for a while, with an employee making sure people got their refunds and then… kaBOOM!

All this is just a part of why you should never assume that because an opportunity uses Google’s name or any other big company’s name that it is in any way legitimate or associated with that company. It’s easy to get a domain name with some other company’s name in it. Doesn’t mean anything, other than that the company is willing to risk having their domain taken for trademark infringement.

These are also the kinds of “opportunities” that the FTC is most likely to be watching out for. Fake blogs, hugely exaggerated earnings… they’re practically begging for trouble. Nothing of what their sites say is remotely likely for the usual buyer, no matter how hard they try.