wafflesatnoon.com

A real-life move has kept me away from this site more than I would like, and I hope to get back to more regular updates soon. Thanks to all who have visited and commented, especially “Not Kevin” who has really made a solid contribution to this site.

Regarding the advertising on this site, I have said what I have to say and will not argue the point any longer. The subject of advertising on this site closed and I will no longer entertain, consider, approve, respond to, or comment on any comments on this topic.

Finally, I hope to not only get back to my normal consumer-based posts, but the old fashioned (aka random subject) blog posts upon which this site was originally built.

Thanks again to everyone who has visited.

If you want to get an idea where some ideas for scams are hatched, look no further than the nightly news. The biggest stories are the best fodder for scammers. Last year when gas prices soared to over $4 a gallon, it was a huge story. Soon thereafter, ads for water for gas started to appearing everywhere. Despite independent claims that these products didn’t work, the ads overwhelmed the voices of dissent.

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Ah, Google. Can’t live without ‘em, but it’s hard to defend ‘em, too. Scams are rampant online, and Google is the biggest ad delivery system online. They take a lot of heat for playing a part in the machine of online scams.

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Advertising is an age-old craft… almost as old as deception. And the two married together often create the modern sales pitch. Here is a list of some of the more commonly used, and most deceptive, advertising terms.

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“We need MacBook users. We’ll give you a MacBook to use/keep. Tell us what you think of it. Current free Mac is the green air.”

That’s how the ad goes. Of course there’s another identical ad on the same page that says the current free Mac is the blue one. But it sounds great, doesn’t it? And it’s so generous of these people to pour advertising dollars into Facebook so they can simply give away computers.

Right?

Well… clicking the ad immediately starts to burst that bubble. On this particular ad today, I was taken to chooseyourcolor.com, and on the home page I now see that the computer is “free with Reward Offer Purchases.” Well, that still sounds easy.

Right?

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Click here to take a simple IQ test!

Your friend has an IQ of 127, can you do better?

You’ve seen the ads. Hopefully you haven’t taken the tests. It’s the IQ test scam, and they hope your ego will force you to take this test while breezing past the small details such as the “terms” on the page. Not a good idea. There are “affiliates” all over the world casting that hook into the ocean, hoping you’ll nibble.

This isn’t as new as some of the other scams out there, but its prevalence and tenacity continue.

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Facebook has taken a lot of heat lately. First it was the “change of terms” controversy, and lately the focus has moved to the flood of ads for dubious sites selling government grant kits, make cash on Google offers, and teeth whitening blogs.

They said they removed the ads weeks ago.

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They’re testing the waters again with a new one.

I ran across a new “make money” offer I hadn’t seen yet. Instead of making money on Google, this one promises “QuickCash from Craigslist.” Hmmm. Sure sounds familiar. It’s like they just took out “Google” and substituted it with “Craigslist.” Brilliant minds at work once again.

I was browsing helium.com and saw the usual low quality ad with the headline “Make $3500 Working From Home.”

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I had so much fun with the Acai/Cleanse fake diet girls that I thought I’d compile a similar photo album of our favorite Google/Grant scam photo models. Because there were so many, I decided to put them into a few categories. It is a good visual of just how ridiculous these scams are, reusing the names and faces over and over in fake personal blogs.

Let’s start with the big guns…

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This is a sort of addendum to my Google/Grants scam list. That page contains a list of the sites pushing these products, and a short description. I recommend it if you haven’t see it yet.

The lists on this page are a sort of reverse-lookup of these sites. The first two lists are what the blogs themselves say you are getting. The first list is the “government grants” list, while the second list is the “make money from Google” list. The names are what the blogs use to describe it, and after each product, I list the websites I found using that description. The final list is what you will find when clicking on these links.

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