by iakul

Created on: January 04, 2010   Last Updated: January 05, 2010

There are thousands of websites promising you that you can make money , and more are mushrooming every day. Sad to say, a large number of these are nothing more than scams, and anyone who wants to actually earn online will have to learn to tell which ones are scams and which ones are genuine.

The first rule, and the one most often repeated is "If it's too good to be true, it probably is." It may seem like a cliche, but you would be amazed at the number of people who are willing to let themselves be blinded by greed.

There are no such things as $1000 per week data entry jobs, no investments that will guarantee you a 0.5% daily return on your investment. Nope. Zilch. Simple common sense will tell you that it isn't worth it for the person doing the hiring to get complete strangers off the net to do overpaid jobs. And having a basic understanding of economics will explain why you can't have a guaranteed 0.5% daily return.

For those new to making money online, it'll help tremendously if you join forums and communities dedicated to such activities. There'll likely be more seasoned veterans with more developed "scam radars" who'll be able to tell you which sites are scams.

A word of caution though. A number of sites do offer referral programs, and this can sometimes skew reviews towards them. If you don't mind putting in some groundwork, you can try going through old posts that someone has made to try to gauge how trustworthy they are.

Also quite a number of sites which are scams tend to exhibit poor grammar or are badly designed or both. It's not always the case though, and sometimes it's simply because it's a new site which hasn't gotten everything worked out yet. It has however been my experience that a disproportionately large number of scams do fall into this category. I suspect that this is due to the fact that scams are not meant to last a long time, so their perpetrators don't bother to put in effort to get a professional site done. But like I mentioned, this is not always the case, and this fact should be used to support other red flags you have uncovered about the site, rather than as the sole basis for forming your opinion about the site.

There are of course other ways to avoid getting scammed, such as checking a site's records and verfying that their physical address is really where they say it is. I'm sure that as you gain more experience with making money online, you find more ways of your own to determine which ones are scams.

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