But what is sad...

Is that scammers such as this rarely completely disappear. They just reinvent themselves with another domain name and keep right on scamming.

Such was the case with a website called Dollarsblaster.com. A friend of mine asked me to look into it because he was thinking of investing. Sit back and read this; I promise it is interesting.

I looked at the site and then took a look at the whois. Low and behold it listed an address right here in Melbourne, Florida where I am. As most of you know I am a Firefighter/Paramedic here and I know most of the streets. The address listed was one of our major roads, Nasa Blvd, but the address did not exist. There wasn't even an empty lot where they listed themselves!

So I email them asking about their service and asking why they would list the whois with an incorrect address. Within an hour of my sending my email I received a reply. They claimed that it was a mistake on their part, that they had moved, and would change the whois soon. Within a week it was indeed changed; to an address in Tempe, Arizona.

So I call a firefighter I know out there and guess what. The address was again bogus. By the way both whois listings included an 800 number that was "disconnected".

At this point I told my friend to stay away from this scam. The whole idea of how it makes money is by basically pyramiding. I pay you, another guy pays me and you, and so on. Because my friend still wasn't convinced I told him that I would take the risk, invest, and show him that it was a scam.

I invested my money and immediately ran into problems. It would seem that Stormpay had ended their relationship with the service at the time which meant that setting up the "affiliate site" would be nearly impossible. After about a week they set up an affiliate site for me sans Stormpay and I began advertising just a little through their service. Basically they say that they will drive traffic to everyone's affiliate sites and this will allow everyone to make money. Uh huh, right...

A month passes and not one sale. I email them asking why I haven't even made one sale and they reply; "it takes time, be patient and keep posting your ads". At this point because I was suspicious that the affiliate site was probably getting at least some hits, I used another pc with a different Internet connection and I basically bought from myself. To this day that second sale never showed up in my affiliate account.

In the end because I paid with Paypal I was able to get my money back by simply contacting paypal and telling them I had been scammed. I never made a sale. And shortly after I emailed paypal the site went down for a bit. (It is back up now but is extremely slow) Now the kicker...

While the site was down I received a "special announcement". They were opening up an all new site just like the first one with a different name and because I was "such a valued and successful affiliate they wanted to offer me first opportunity to join". LOL....nope, don't think so.

Check the whois now and it is some address in India. Good luck checking to see if that one is legit or not. The other site started out with a whois in the U.S. and once again changed to an address in India.

The Internet is filled with scams and scammers. The best thing people can do to avoid them is simply don't get greedy.

You CANNOT:

Make money without working, even online.

Get free money simply by emailing people or by adding your email to a list.

Make money by buying into something that basically depends on others buying beneath you when there is nothing tangible being exchanged and expect to make sales.

Shut down all of the scammers.

But you can learn more about them which will allow you to avoid them like the plague. If they don't make sales, they aren't scamming, and if they don't make sales eventually they will go away.