The internet on one hand is great but on the other it's a real den of thieves. There are scams around every corner and it seems that almost every other email is trying to con us to reveal out personal login/username (for EBay, Paypal or Natwest) alongside other information such as Credit Card numbers.

Don't Get Scammed - How To Use The Internet As An Advantage

So the scammers, shysters and thieves love the internet because it has opened up a whole new avenue of profit for them. Not only can they be located in dodgy countries they can also target anyone and everyone on the planet.

But law abiding citizens can also use the internet to their advantage because we now have at our fingertips the most powerful research and communications tool every developed.

• Does an investment proposal sound a little too good to be true?

• Then use the internet to do some research and digging and see what you can find out

• If the proposal or investment idea is so good and/or lucrative then you can bet others will be debating its finer points

• But more importantly, if it's a scam then on message boards and internet sites there's likely to be some real warnings

For example, if someone conned by the cold calling offshore brokers had searched Google for both the 'broking company's' name and the company they were pushing then there's better than a 95% chance that on some message board or internet site there would have been warnings.

Where To Find Information On The Scams

Google is your number one friend for research but also check out this excellent website on scams –

www.quatloos.com

It's a educational website (published by US non-profit company) covering a wide variety of financial scams and frauds, including wacky “prime bank” frauds, exotic foreign currency scams, offshore investment frauds, tax scams, “Pure Trust” structures and more.

Another good site for stockmarket related 'investments' is the message board www.trade2win.com/boards/

Summary

Yes, we've said it before and will do so again – Google and the other big search engines are your number one research tool for getting the real information into many of these online scams. If you spend time doing your own personal due diligence then the odds of not getting scammed go up dramatically.

PS. Feel free to contact us at LearnMoney if you've ever unsure of an investment idea or proposal.