Raise your hand if you are one of these people?



Here are some tips to separate scammers and honest merchants on the internet.

Guarantee:

Make sure your merchant has at least a 30 day guarantee. You will need this time to start your own online business, any less will not give you enough time to gather materials you to start your home business.

Any goods shipped by US or Canadian Postal services fall under the mandate of the Federal Postal Law that all goods have an unconditional 30 days money back guarantee. Have a problem with your merchant next time? Make use of this federal law as a solution.

Refund Policy:

Check to see whether the merchant has a refund policy before you buy anything. This will save you a lot of heartache later on. Scammers are only interested in one thing - sell and hide. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but most scammers are only interested in one thing: your money and they will do anything to keep your money.

Honest merchants believe that if their products are as good as they say they are, customers will come back for more. Their refund policy would be timely and detailed as possible for swift process. Untimely refunds would hurt a merchant's reputation and in business, reputation is easy to gain, but impossible to regain.

Secure Order Page:

When you place your order and fill in all your confidential information, make sure you are on a secure website. Check to see whether there is an extra 's' in the address box. If the owner cannot afford to get a secure order page, there is something fishy going on.

This is a secure page: https://orderpage

This is not a secure page: http://orderpage

‘ Phishing' Scam:

“We suspect an unauthorized transaction on your account. To ensure that your account is not compromised, please click the link below and confirm your identity.”

“During our regular verification of accounts, we couldn't verify your information. Please click here to update and verify your information.”

Have you received email with a similar message? It's a scam called “phishing” — and it involves Internet fraudsters who send spam or pop-up messages to lure personal information (credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number, passwords, or other sensitive information) from unsuspecting victims.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation's consumer protection agency, phishers send an email or pop-up message that claims to be from a business or organization that you may deal with — for example, an Internet service provider (ISP), bank, online payment service, or even a government agency. The message may ask you to “update,” “validate,” or “confirm” your account information.

Some phishing emails threaten a dire consequence if you don't respond. The messages direct you to a website that looks just like a legitimate organization's site. But it isn't. It's a bogus site whose sole purpose is to trick you into divulging your personal information so the operators can steal your identity and run up bills or commit crimes in your name.

I hope these tips will help you separate scammers and honest merchants.

To your success,

Katie Fong