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Fraud & Scams Discussion about how to detect and avoid fraud, investment schemes, internet scams, consumer ripoffs, con jobs, forex scams and identity theft. |
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Crowdfunding is the new, hot medium for scam artists to con people out of their money. They create fictitious products, make up pseudonyms to peddle them and then post flashy, exciting-looking videos, pictures and promises to nab people into giving them money.
Some of these scams are for hundreds of dollars, some of them in the thousands. Here is an example of a crowdfunding scam: (I can't post links yet, as I am under 15 posts, but type in "ritot everyone knows it's a scam now" into google and find the first link) Essentially, this "product" was marketed as a watch that projected the time from your wrist onto your hand. Sounds cool huh? The problem is that the technology doesn't exist, and all of the updates from the company responsible for it show technology that is so large that it couldn't possibly fit inside something that fits on your wrist: (type "ritot posts an engineering update" into google, it's the first link) And that's just an example of one scam. There are thousands of pleasant-sounding things on these crowdfunding sites that are in actuality simply attempts to con you out of your money. BE VIGILANT! One thing to look out for is whether the names that are being used by the "company" are actually real. Many of these companies come up with a fake name. These will be easy to spot, because they have no social presence on the web, or are clearly not the person that is associated with the company. Sound too good to be true? It probably is, and I would suggest doing a TON of research before spending any money. Many of these scams don't start out as such -- often there are people who come up with a cool sounding product, and then are WAY over their heads when it comes to actually delivering. Products that require engineering should have an engineer on staff to make sure that the idea isn't just a pipe dream. |
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