Cash Gifting Scams and How to Spot them

Before discussing cash gifting scams, it is useful to first of all explain what exactly the term scam means. Unfortunately, these days some people tend to describe any opportunity in which they fail to make money, for whatever reason, as a scam. To such persons, any and every gifting activity could be described as gifting scams.

What is a scam?

A scam is basically any deceitful or fraudulent business opportunity designed to obtain money from the victim through misrepresentation. Notice that many scams may be confidence tricks but not necessarily illegal. The scammers use a variety of complicated and dubious business practices to get around the laws and regulations. The following list of typical home business scams is instructive:

Some Work at Home Scams:

1. Craft Assembly:In this scam you are supposed to assemble toys, dolls, and other craft projects at home in the hope of being paid high rates for each piece. To get started you are asked to pay an upfront fee for the starter kit. The latter includes assembly instructions and the parts. The problem is that, upon assembling your first batch of crafts, the company will tell you that the finished products don’t meet their specifications or some such excuse. The reality is that the company is making money from selling the assembly kits and not the finished product. So, even if you could have a robot to perfectly assemble the kit, you will still not make any money because you will be left tons of assembled crafts with no one to sell them to.

2. Medical Billing: This particular scam involves you paying significant money upfront for the opportunity to start your own medical billing service from the comfort of your own home. In exchange for your money you are given a medical billing software program together with a list of potential clients in your state or area. The scam is that most medical clinics process their own bills and those that outsource, do so to companies not individuals.

3. Email Processing/Surveys:This scam is the internet version of the classic "envelope stuffing scam”. In this case you are told that for a small fee you can be given the chance to earn a huge income processing emails from your armchair. Earn $25 processing emails their ads would promise.Once the scammer receive your money, they will send you instructions on how to spam the ad that you previously responded to, in newsgroups and forums.

4. Typing At Home: After sending the fee to the scammer for more information, he will send you a software and information that tells you how you too can place home typist ads and thus sell copies of your software to new victims. …..

We could go on and on, but you get the idea. Scams are part and parcel of the internet landscape. As the wheat grows so does the grass. Just beware of scams and you will be alright.

Cash Gifting Scams:

Like every other internet opportunity, there are genuine cash gifting opportunities which when joined and worked as presented can yield a good income. There are also cash gifting scams. The obvious question is how can one identify such scams? Here are tale-tale signs of a cash gifting scam:

1. Hype:If your inviter or the cash gifting program itself makes exaggerated claims designed to mislead you into thinking that you can succeed at cash gifting without doing any serious effort beyond the payment of enrollment fee, then this is clearly dishonest and you are very likely to be scammed. As soon as they collect you money, you will be left to your own devices. There is no such thing as automatic business. That is just another name for a scam.

2. Hidden Charges:Some cash gifting programs claim to have low or even no sign-up fees. But as soon as you pay them your hard-earned cash, that’s when you discover that there many more hidden charges involved than you thought. For example, some of the postcard based cash gifting programs often don’t tell the prospect that in order to succeed you will most like spend thousands more in buying leads from brokers before you can expect to receive gifts like you might have seen them do in a flash Youtube video. In some other programs you have to pay additional fees for marketing software. But we all know that without marketing, no one can succeed in cash gifting.

3. Lack of Details:In some cases, certain programs won’t give, up-front, you the slightest idea the details of how you’ll make all this money that they are promising.  A genuine money making opportunity will allow the chance to examine every aspect of the opportunity, so that you can make an informed decision. Such hard-sell techniques are signs that the promoter is not confident about the quality of the product and simply wants to trick you into parting with your cash. Such a program would, in my view, qualify for a cash gifting scam to be avoided.

4. Illegal Cash Gifting Programs:Even when the program itself is itself a genuine money making opportunity , if it is illegal to promote in your country or province, then you run the risk of having the program terminated at anytime or worst go to prison for promoting the program. There several cases in which those participating illegal programs have been charged with a felony and then ordered to pay back all the money that they collected from others in their gifting program. This too can arguably be considered a cash gifting scam since the net result is the same.

5. Discontinued Programs:Another class of cash gifting scams concerns websites promoting programs for which either the inviter, (or worst the administration) is no longer actively promoting the program. In many cases, when people stop promoting their program, they don’t take down the website for the program. For example, a few years ago, I signed for ezcashgifts, only to find that I could not have my gift acknowledged and when I sent an email to the administration, I received no reply. It was then that I realized I had just lost $15.

6. %100 Cash Gifting Scams:Finally, there are certain programs which are manifestly scams. Such programs are either endless chains or certain forced matrix systems. Any cash gifting program in which the payment is not direct member to member is in all likely hood a scam. There are programs out there with exotic sounding payment structures which can easily be manipulated by a dishonest administrator. When a program promises that you will be rewarded with the next 5 people who join the program from any part of the world, irrespective of their inviter, then you should be suspicious. All such programs are subject to manipulation and are in all likely hood cash gifting scams
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