Samuel's Blog

Amusing Internet Scams

August 18th, 2006 at 03:27pm

Last week one of the Google ads on this site led to another website, which was offering a $1000+per day work at home data entry job. On this website some woman claims to work a couple hours a day doing data entry for major Internet companies such as Ebay, Yahoo, Verizon etc, and earning astranomical amounts of money in the process. According to this “Computer Learning Centre” website, these companies don’t publicise these jobs very much.

This easily fits into the “too good to be true category” for any number of reasons including the facts that data entry jobs don’t pay thousands of dollars for a couple hours work (half my job is data entry…I get about $20/hour), the companies mentioned are dealing with sensitive information which would not be delegated to unchecked third parties, and major Internet companies who need external data entry staff have got some efficiency and automation problems. So in order to counter this problem, “Computer Learning Centre” show screenshots of bank statement “proving” that they really do get all of this money, and they even go and announce that they are approved by the “Consumer Advocacy Group of America“.

The consumer advocacy website details a few scams and non-scams, and has this to say about the Computer Learning Centre:

Name: Computer Learning Center Data Training Course
Rating: 97
Average Investment: $179
Average Yearly Return: $85,000
Summary: This company offers a short course in how to earn a comfortable living doing data entry from your home computer. Obviously, this is not the kind of data entry many people are used to. But using the power of the internet, and in connection with a number of well known companies, participants are taught how to type simple data in online forms which net more money than we thought was possible. We were suspicious of this opportunity and thought it was too good to be true until we spoke with a number of people participating in the program. Those involved were more than satisfied with their earnings. We followed up with a Business Bureau check and found no complaints whatsoever in the last three years.

Starting to sound plausible isn’t it? Well it does until you start to look into the technical side of the websites…one was registered on the 20th of June, the other on the 21st, they are both hosted by GoDaddy, they were previously both on the same server, one has since been moved, they both host their secure pages on the same server, the registration details for each site has been modified every week or so since registration, and the discount offer for the data entry course has been marked as expiring on progressively later dates since the sites went online.

Currently the discount is set to expire today (Friday 18th August)…should be interesting to watch that move. Even more odd, the discount keeps being extended despite the website stating “even though the data entry work is unlimited, the Computer Learning Center staff is starting to get overloaded. And they don’t want to take on so many students that they can’t give everyone personal attention. So unfortunately, they may have to discontinue taking on new students for this program in the near future.”

Moving onto another scam now, and Clayton Northcutt has been keeping one email scammer busy recently, and managed to attain the title of “Executive Officer of Outlet EDF23” and identification tag number “EDF/015 /Clayton Northcutt” for the Matsushita Semiconductor Company Ltd. For the full amusing details, see these posts in order:
Saturday August 5
Sunday August 6
Monday August 7
Friday August 11 and
Sunday August 13

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Bizarreness

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