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.
