These guys didn't make $11,668.00 on Google and neither will you
Posted : Saturday March 7th, 2009

As part of my ongoing effort to expose shady operators for the scum they are a brief note about some of the ads displaying on Facebook.

One of the current shady ads reads something like "Would You Like to know how I got $11,668.00 by Posting Links on Google?" and links here. Not even sure where to start with this trash but it begins with the picture of a Government of Canada cheque for revenue that is supposedly coming from Google. What the product actually is is another problem. The links from the site lead to another page, I suppose eventually one would pay for information about Google AdSense. Information that's freely available by the way.

Well if you're not sure why this is a scam here are the reasons

1. The ad landing page misrepresents how Google AdSense works to begin with. You don't get paid for "posting links on Google" (whatever that gibberish is supposed to mean). You get AdSense revenue by hosting Google ads on sites with decent amounts of unique web traffic.
2. The site also implies that the money will start flowing right away. It won't. Google isn't stupid. And there is no, and I can't emphasize this enough, NO quick path to untold riches with AdSense. Google isn't stupid and this is a business and the real world. Getting $11,000 in AdSense revenue per month is certainly possible but you have to have actual real traffic and a lot of it in order to see numbers like that. To get an idea 50,000 pages served to real traffic in a month will get you around $100. (These numbers will vary 10-20% for a variety of reasons) So to actually get $11,000 in monthly revenue will require about 5.5 million page hits per month. And let's be clear, that's a lot of page hits and a lot of users. Scams like this often have "advice" about generating traffic in a variety of artificial ways but... you won't be fooling anyone. It takes 2 months after the end of a month before Google sends you any money. Why? So they can look for fraud, and when they find your fraud your account will be closed and you will get zero.
3. Even if there weren't the problems listed above this is a scam because there is no "real" information that they are selling that isn't already available for free. The only information that isn't available on the AdSense site itself would be the "advice" and "tricks" that violate the AdSense terms of service and if followed will see the termination of your account.

But wait. There's more. If you looked at the page you'd see it was "written" by some dude named "Richard Tucker" and there's a nice picture of him enjoying his new lifestyle with his family in Disneyland. Charming. Here's something though, there's another one of these ads running on Facebook titled like "Let me show you how to get $11,668.05 Free from the Canadian Government in 30 days" and that links to another site linked here. This page by one "Jeffrey Donahue" has a plan for scanning the government to get "free" grant money. Now I shouldn't be having to point this out but you aren't going to be scamming Revenue Canada for $11,000. More though we have the same scanned photo of a government cheque as on "Richard Tucker"s site and, oh, what is this, the same picture of "the family on vacation at Disneyland".

Some of these scammers, or at least these clowns, make such a poor effort it's wonder that anyone needs to be warned at all. But sadly they wouldn't be in the scamming business if there weren't people willing to get scammed. Don't be one of those people. I honestly hope that shining bright lights into the dark corners of the internet will help reduce the number of these frauds. Likely not, but I remain hopeful.

Tags

  AdSense  Canada  Facebook  fraud  revenue  shady  weasels 

Categories

Internet  Business 

Comments

Tina - Mar 13th 2009 11:03 PM
 
I really enjoyed your article/blog. I absolutely HATE these schemes as well. I am sure that all too often people with big dreams and little brains (or experience) fall for this crap. I can't remember when a paycheque from a private business came in the form of a Canadian Government Cheque!! Anyways, I can't really say anything that you haven't already pointed out - good job!

Lorie - Mar 21st 2009 8:35 PM
 
I agree with all of the above comments. The first thing that made me suspicious and still does is why would google pay (the government it seems?)and then have the Receiver General issue the cheque to the "home-worker"? There is no way. Google would send their own cheques - to enable them to declare them as expenses and because they would have no reason whatsoever to involve the Canadian Government in it. What a crock@

Max - Apr 4th 2009 12:53 PM
 
Thanks both for the feedback.

Unfortunately I have seen these very ads cropping up a few times on some more mainstream media sites(aka not Facebook).

Eric - May 29th 2009 2:41 PM
 
Thanks for your blog. But you shouldn't. I quite enjoy seeing the scams like this; it's funny to see the new ways they come up with, which are always the same ways anyway since the start of times, and knowing people get caught in them. If you don't have the brains to not be scammed, so be scammed.