s inflation in Pakistan climbs to sky high rates, more and more people are looking for alternatives to make money to make ends meet.
Many of these people turn to the internet as a source of income and majority of them get caught up in a web of deception spun by scammers and con artists. In fact a study claims that the top cyber crimes in Pakistan are financial crimes.
Why is it so attractive?
Making money via internet is attractive for a number of reasons.
The comfort of sitting at home and generating income is massively appealing. Add to it that the only investment is a computer and an internet connection and you’ve got yourself a potential goldmine.
Scammers count on this desire to make a quick rupee, to achieve their goals. Everyday one gets hammered by an unending stream of emails trying to part you from your cash. But now that most people are aware of the risks of junk email, scammers are turning to more inventive ways to cheat people out of their money.
Scamming has reached new heights these days with the saddest development being this trend spreading fast in Pakistan with our own people trying to cheat us out of our own money.
Check following ads appearing in our main stream newspapers:
Images via PKReaders
Minting Money in the name of Registration Fee!
One example is the now defunct rozzgar.tk. This website claimed to be an advertising agency with connections to various companies in Pakistan. They tried to lure people into the concept of free cash, namely, by offering money to display ads on websites and blogs even if they received zero traffic.
Too good to be true? Well, yeah. The catch was that they had a registration fee. They offered different packages, with the expensive ones offering more money to host ads on your blog. You might be rolling your eyes on how could one fall for such an obvious scam but estimates suggest that they managed to acquire around 4 million rupees in the space of one month, before shutting down. Thousands of people lost money and when the scam was reported, they just disappeared with all the money.
Trapping in the name of Adsense:
Undoubtedly, if you have interesting content to offer and you wish to generate some money from your efforts, Google Adsense is your best friend. It has been referred to as the online moneymaking machine. In a sense, it is just that. Blogs with high traffic are generating significant amounts of money through Adsense.
But with it comes a generation of scammers hoping to exploit its popularity. And surprise surprise, this seems like a popular way to commit fraud amongst our fellow country men. Some rely on fake checks they claim they received from Google, and offer information on how others can do the same by visiting a specific site or signing up with a program which costs money or it could just be a link to earn the scammer in question some money. Take this for example:
Scammers use various techniques to get your attention, few being:
- They claim to increase ones Adsense earning many folds by unraveling the “Adsense secret” for a meager amount of money. But the truth is that there is no secret to that.
- They offer lists of certain golden keywords which they claim can help to generate more traffic and clicks. And it can help to earn more revenue per click. But Google itself offers these lists to facilitate the process.
Not only this, one can come across banners of people offering up to 30,000 Rs for working only a few hours a day using Adsense. Alarmingly, even our newspapers are starting to display these scam ads (given above). Most of
these scams hit people who are new internet users or particularly the jobless.
Get Verified Google Adsense Account in Rs 500: Another Fake!
Keeping in light the amount of fraud committed by countries like India and Pakistan,
Google has complicated the process of obtaining an Adsense account. It requires unique content, your own domain, and that your blog be older than 6 months to get an account.
In fact, we did an article on how Adsense was being exploited as early as March 2009.
Sadly, now that an Adsense account is not easy to obtain, exploiters are now offering “verified Adsense accounts” in a few hours for money. It’s a scam. Don’t fall for it.
Ahsad Javed did a detailed post on Google Adsense Verified Account fraud here
Implications:
Google has strict security policies and when it uncovers the amount of corruption being done in Pakistan in its name, it may ban Adsense which would badly hit thousands of people in Pakistan, specially our bloggers.
As I draw to closing this post, I’d just like to say that be smart forget about the notion of easy money. And don’t fall prey to the vultures in wait in the cyber world, it only spurs them on and gives our country a bad name.
Here are a few websites you can read to help you understand the nature of cyber crimes and how to stay clear of them. These sites also offer tips on recognizing scams.
- http://www.webworkshop.net/adsense-ready-websites-scams.html
- http://www.listmyfive.com/94d846fa/The-Top-Five-Ways-to-Avoid-Being-Scammed-on-the-Internet
- http://factoidz.com/10-signs-you-are-being-scammed/
- http://www.computercourage.com/2008/10/03/phishing-how-to-avoid-being-scammed-via-email/
- http://www.hoax-slayer.com/
How to Earn Money Online?
Okay, this is also a fact that earning money online is possible. But believe me that’s not as simple as these newspaper ads suggest. If you want to money, keep following things in mind:
- You can earn money, if you have a skill that others may get benefited of over the internet. For example, development, design, data-entry, proof reading, writing content and so on. To read more on this click this link:http://propakistani.pk/2011/01/28/how-to-earn-money-internet-in-pakistan/
- If you want to earn through adsense, then be informed: Adsense only favors highly visited website. So now its in your hands on how you make your website popular. Maybe by adding very very interesting and useful information, so that every other web user come to you website.
