As I’m always looking for truly new and original money making ideas, I spotted an eBay listing the other day that instantly said "scam".  The sales pitch wasn’t too bad, but it was littered with typos and grammatical errors which is never a good sign.

But what really made me chuckle, well I laughed out loud actually, was the supposed "proof" of how much money this person makes on and off eBay using his "little known business techniques".

It’s so badly done, it really is funny, and so I’m going to share it with you.  I’ve annotated the two glaring mistakes I spotted straight away, there may be others and if you spot any, then please leave a comment.

The first error in the supposed screenshot of their online statement from HSBC, is that if you look at the "balance" column on the right hand side, the amount goes up as tens of thousands of pounds are paid into the account.  But if you look at the left hand column, the date goes down from the 1st August to the 18th July.  D’oh!

The second mistake you have to look a little closely for.  But, you can clearly see it once you know it’s there.

The font used in the statement is a sans-serif font.  A serif is the little twiddly bit you get with some fonts such as Times New Roman, and "sans" is French for "without", so sans-serif means "without serif".  Fonts like Arial or Verdana are sans-serif as they don’t have the little twiddly bits.

However, where the "statement" has been edited to show money paid in, they used a serif font to type in PAYPAL.  You can see it most clearly where the letter "L" has been used.

Oh dear, how silly…

The screenshot is here and opens up in a new window.

Now while there are many ways of making money online, this is one of the darker methods.  Fooling people into thinking there are big bucks to be made with their methods when in fact, their income is most likely at the same level as their outgoings shown in the statement.

Why do people do this?  I think it might be because they believe that there aren’t any legitimate methods of earning money online, or it could just be because they’re bad, or desperate, or both.

Whatever the reason, it’s wrong.  They’re wrong.  You can make a lot of money online, but you don’t have to hurt other people in order to do it.

They’d clearly worked hard on the eBay listing to make it appeal to as many people as possible, and it was well laid out in spite of the typos.  If they put as much imagination and effort into a real product, they’d make money out of it.

MLM and Pyramid are at first glance similar. The difference is with pyramid it’s1) illegal in most developed countries,
2) it’s immoral (IMO),
3) the sole source of income with pyramid is the recruiting of new members who pay a fee to join.

Sometimes with pyramid, members are forced to buy some worthless stock which they can never sell, such as cleaning products costing thousands. Their income (and the people above them) is derived solely from new members joining and paying their “membership fee” which then gets shared out up the tree.

The longest time a pyramid scheme will manage to last before collapsing is about 18-24 months. In Cork in Ireland early in 2006, there was a variant on pyramid which slipped through the legal loopholes because it involved people “gifting” several thousand pounds to other people in the hope that in a few weeks another batch of people would do the same for them.

Needless to say it ripped the community apart when the money ran out, there were death threats etc., but essentially it all boiled down to stupidity and greed.

Before this was Women Empowering Women, another pyramid scam aimed at women, doing the same thing. I believe it originated in Canada where many politicians and police are involved, so don’t expect that one to come to a happy conclusion.

There have been many variants over the years, do a Google for “Ponzi scheme”.

On the other hand, MLM is perfectly legal as it involves goods that have worth and are truly retailable, which is regarded as the rule of thumb. It is also closely scrutinised in many countries.

A very good example in the UK is VWD and their e-Lottery Syndicate. It’s been going for 4 years now and appears to be totally above board. There’s enough money going in that it won’t ever collapse, and you’re actually getting a product for your money in the form of lottery entries. And you can drop out at any time and there’s been no big investment of money. Very clever.

As someone has pointed out to me, the payment processor PayPal don’t differentiate. To them Pyramid and MLM are one and the same.

I think probably everyone has (at some time) had emails from people involved in a chain email and 5 people on the list, where you pay £3.00 by PayPal? That’s pyramid, and that’s a scam, so don’t ever get involved.

It’s a variant on the old chain letters from 30 years ago and more that used to do the rounds where you send money to the next person in the chain, then send it to 10 other people. All pyramid, all scams.

The people at the top get the lion’s share and the people at the bottom get nothing.

If you think about the PayPal email, it’s total BS. Very little of it stands up to any kind of scrutiny, but it relies on the emotions to drag you in.

I think it quotes things like 10% take up rate (yeah right), PayPal have said it’s legal (yeah right), it can’t be cheated as PayPal will only let you have one account ( yeah right).

And with that last one alone, we all know you can have multiple email addresses with a single PayPal account, up to 8 I think. So you just take out 5 free email addresses, add them all to your PayPal account, edit the list to include all your email addresses and send it out to everyone in your address book.

It’s just scummy. Why go to all the bother? If as much effort was put into legally earning money, they’d all be wealthy people.

My wife and I sell various items online, one of those being glow sticks to the UK market only, although we’re closing that side of the business down and are currently running out our stock.

We normally ship larger orders by DHL via our local Staples office supplies store, it’s very convenient for us (less than a mile away) and has been very reasonably priced as it’s an official DHL pick up point. On the 21st July, they introduced a new pricing structure which effectively trebled our shipping costs every time we used them

There were all sorts of other inconveniences too, such as *they* had to pack our orders in special cartons.

So we stopped using them.

Our local DHL driver paid us a visit yesterday to explain it’s all been “a bit of a cock-up” as the new prices were only supposed to apply to international deliveries! So he’s advised us to give it another couple of days, and go back and the prices should be back to normal.

We don’t quite think that’s exactly right, however.

We know that this has hit a lot of small businesses like ours, and en masse they have switched to Parcels4Deliveries who use ParcelForce for their deliveries. P4D have recently re-negotiated their charges with them, and are offering an unbeatable deal. We only discovered P4D on the 25th and we were still in the process of checking them out when our DHL driver turned up.

What we think has really happened is that DHL and Staples senior management have decided to put their prices up as more and more people were using them. It was a success story all round until the price hike.

You see, we were shown their marketing material by one of the ladies at Staples, so we know it was fully intended to be for the UK delivery market, not international deliveries as we were told yesterday. She said that she had been on the roll-out course and spoken to DHLs marketing director and that he had insisted it was a good idea even though she told him they would lose business.

We then believe it has all blown up in their face as everyone has moved to P4D, and there’s been a mad scramble to get their customers back!

Probably too late for a lot of their business.

Of course we could be totally wrong on all of this, but I guess we’ll never know the full truth. If I find out any more from Staples, I’ll post it here.

I woke up this morning and I didn’t like what I’d done.  So I’ve decided to go with the much more business-like Semiologic Theme. 

Probably at some point I’ll upgrade to the pro package, but this is pretty good for now.

I got the blog up and running and actually looking and working how I want it, all apart from one little graphical glitch.  Not bad for a couple of hours work.