Can someone please come up with an original scam? Is that too much to ask?
To our regular readers, I apologize for the broken-record nature of this post. You won’t believe me, but honestly, Steve and I try hard not to be too redundant.
But come on! Scammers aren’t making it very easy. It’s the same junk, day after day, with the same images of shiny happy people flashing cash. Only the names change, and sometimes not even that! The problem is, they keep changing the key words so we have to put up a new post that people who search for those key words will see.
And what makes it worse is that they’re all in bed together. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that any given scam is just one or two clicks away from any other given scam. If you click around enough, you’ll meet all of the main players, some of whom will shortly be out of business, I hope.
Explodingwebtrends.com is pitching the same gimmick we’ve been hollering about for months. Here is the gimmick:
- You order a CD (in this case, the “Twitter Cash Kit,” which magically morphs into the “Web Cash Explosion Kit” once you get a click or two deep from the original offer)
- The “free” CD costs you just $3.97 or $1.97 or $.97 (I got three different quotes) for Shipping and handling.
- When you put in your name and credit card info, you are also signing up for a 7-day free trial of some membership site. (This fact is often hidden from view.)
- If you don’t cancel the trial before the 7 days expires, your credit card is banged for the cost of a monthly membership (in this case, $49.87).
- The free trial is often impossible to cancel because nobody answers the phone at the listed customer service number.
The result? You paid $50 (and maybe much more) for a “free” CD that usually contains useless information, if you receive it at all.
The Trail of Shame
It all started at the-daily-reporter.com, a sales site dressed up to look like a real newspaper site. It pretends to be a news story about Twitter Cash Kit, the revolutionary way to make money online using the ubiquitous Twitter.
When you click the Twitter Cash Kit link, you’re taken to explodingwebtrends.com, which takes your info and signs you up for a membership to prosperuniversity.com for about $50 per month. It’s there that you’ll allegedly learn how to spam all your Twitter followers until they quit following you out of sheer disgust. (I’m speculating here. Maybe there really is a way to cash in on Twitter and make $7k per month. And maybe I’ll win the lottery tomorrow.)
Explodingwebtrends.com is staying on the good side of the law by clearly disclosing what they’re doing. It says right there in black and white that by buying your free CD (did you catch the irony?), you are signing up for a 7-day free trial. That’s more than the worst of these offers tell you, which usually go to great lengths to hide the hidden fees. Kudos on that bit of honesty, guys.
When the FTC and Google cracked down on “Google Cash Kit” and “Google Treasure Chest” and other such garbage, enterprising marketers simply swapped out “Google” and swapped in “Twitter.” Soon they’ll get slapped on the wrist and have to swap in something else.
You can learn to make money online, but not with some free CD that’s hiding its true purpose of dinging you for a monthly membership. Lots of people will fall for it. But not our readers. Stay sharp, y’all.
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