Are you looking for an easy way to blow through potentially thousands and thousands of dollars worth of your savings, all while getting the opportunity to have your own small part in a little criminal activity while you’re at it? Have I got a deal for you…
Lately, I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into various ways one can make money from more passive sources than the ol’ 9 to 5. After all, who doesn’t want to make more money while doing less? (The mood is striking me especially hard these last few days, what with beautiful fall weather while I’m spend entirely too much time, for example, trying to explain standard practices in very basic bookkeeping to one of my denser clients). There are the old standbys of rental property or limited partnerships, but both generally require a bit more in terms of monetary investment than the extra room shown on my balance sheet has reflected as of late.
So I’ve been specifically looking for substantially cheaper options. In particular, the various possibilities in the online arena have attracted my attention. You can run Adsense or YPN or whoever’s ads alongside content you create (or have someone else create in your stead). Or get some commission from affiliate products you recommend to your readers. Or set up your own storefront and sell others items picked up at wholesale (Better yet, have them dropshipped straight to your customers – inventory management can be a pain!). Or create your own products and sell them. Or create your own products and have others sell them. Or…
Well, you get the point. What I’m saying is, there are tons and tons of possibilities out there, and I’ve been enjoying the education. But one ‘opportunity’ in particular caught my attention, simply because I thought these type of things were much more policed than they apparently are: high yield investment programs aka HYIPs.
Recently, I stumbled across a little news item on one of these ‘investment’ called 12DailyPro detailing how many thousands of people lost many millions of dollars (FYI, the accountant’s report has a lot more meaty details than the news snippet). The gist of 12DailyPro was:
- Buy into the program at whatever level you wanted to ‘invest.’
- Install an autosurf program on your computer (more on autosurf from the SEC). The program purportedly would automatically visit many websites, which would then generate advertising revenue. I’ll bet advertisers just love this kind of junk, assuming the program actually did anything at all!
- Magically receive a 12% return on your ‘investment’ – daily – for 12 days.
- Rinse. Repeat.
- Oh, and somewhere in there, it sure would be nice if you could bring a few new investors into this grand opportunity.
Of course, the scheme was nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme. Early investors were simply paid with money from later investors. Amazingly, I still see some ‘investors’ blaming the pay processor for the failure of the program rather than the fact that they were involved in a scam that was sustainable only as long as they could convince bigger fools than themselves to ‘invest.’ Anyone with a tenth of a clue and an honest bone in their body had to realize that getting an easy 12% daily return can’t be legitimate, so I don’t feel particularly bad for most of those who lost money. But I’m sure there are a few less-than-a-tenth-of-a-clue people out there, and I do feel for them. Hopefully acquiring this clue wasn’t too expensive for them!
12DailyPro is now shut down. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of other copies of the same plan for blowing your hard earned cash. Want to find your own ‘investment opportunites’? Google for autosurf or HYIP, and you can find links to probably hundreds of these scams. Maybe you can make some money off the more gullible, or maybe you can lose your shirt.
Me? I’m going to keep reading, keep learning, keep experimenting, continue making a little – and hopefully, some day, not quite so little – money on the side, and sleep well at night.
[Read a bunch more 'How To...'s at the latest group writing project on Darren Rowse's ProBlogger.]
[tags]HYIP,high yield investment program,12 Daily Pro,scam,investment,making money online,passive income[/tags]
