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More news about Google money scams and work from home scams

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You may have seen advertisements, web sites, or emails saying that Google is hiring – paying people thousands of dollars to work from home. It’s not true, and the companies behind these ads are using Google’s name without permission.

We’ve been trying to get word out, and we’ve got a new post on the Official Google Blog about how the company is fighting fraud by taking “Google Money” scammers to court.

The story has really been taking off. Here’s a story from CBS News (I’m featured near the end):

Another story from a local NBC affiliate in Utah goes in to a little more detail on one of the companies named in the suit:

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

And here’s a story from KQED radio news – this is pretty exciting for me, since I listen to NPR on my way to and from work every day:

In general, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is. If you see an offer promising thousands of dollars for very little effort or investment, be skeptical.

MSNBC Article About Scams Promising Money From Google

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I did another interview a couple weeks ago about all the scams and get-rich-quick schemes using Google’s name and logo to fool people. Here’s the article at MSNBC, take a look.

Here’s a pretty good quote that sums up the scammers pretty well:

“They prey on people who are desperate,” says Ohio truck driver Robert Anderson, who fell for a home-based job opportunity that appeared to be from Google. “They make money by lying to people, promising them the world and giving them a guarantee they have no intention of honoring.”

I don’t have much more to add except that this sort of thing is showing up everywhere – email spam, spam accounts on Twitter, various ad networks, etc. Much of it is automated but the profit margins are high enough that they can afford to have actual people creating accounts, solving captchas, etc. so any company getting spammed with these schemes has to take a proactive approach.

As Shipwreck so presciently explained in 1985, the other half of the battle is knowing. Please feel free to send this article, or the one from ABC, or the Google Blog post around to any friends and family wondering about making money online. The truth is, may people make money with their websites, but it takes hard work. There’s no secret kit that returns cash with no effort and no investment.

Talking about Google work from home scams on Good Morning America

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I was on Good Morning America this morning, interviewed for a story about the many online work-at-home scams that are floating around the web these days. Here’s a link to the story on the web site, and here’s a direct link to the video. Edit: I guess GMA’s urls don’t really work, the actual video at the link keeps changing. I even used their “link to this” button! I’ll try to find a more permanent url. I would embed the video for you here but unfortunately ABCNews doesn’t seem to allow embedding.

This is a very important story – these scams employ a number of social engineering techniques to seem trustworthy and they are tricking people who are desperate for work out of their money. The folks at GMA did a good job explaining the issue without getting too technical and confusing – please forward this on to anyone you know who’s wondering about schemes like these.

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