After spending many years in forums devoted to the subject of Report Scam, it appears that most think a program, company, or business opportunity is a scam if they do not make money with it. It seems to me that that is the only real requisite for being able to cry scam online. However, just because a person fails to build a network marketing business,
online or off, doesn’t make the opportunity/program a scam. It may simply mean that the person who failed, didn’t do something right, or work hard enough, or at all for that matter. So many think they can sign up for a program and money will just roll in. When it doesn’t happen that way, rather than look to themselves for the failure, it is easier to cry scam on the company.
As for the thought of money for nothing, some would blame the marketers, for leading them to believe that it is possible to amass huge quantities of cash for doing absolutely nothing. However, they really can’t blame anyone but themselves, because they were stupid enough to fall for it.
Think about this: Say a person buys a TrueValue(TM) franchise, but does not advertise the business, or does not promote it enough in the right places, and they lose their shirt, file for bankruptcy, etc.. Does that give them the right to call TrueValue(TM) a scam? Certainly not.
Or say that someone orders a product from a mail order catalog, and the billing gets screwed up; say the person was charged twice… Does that mean the mail order company is a scam? No it does not. Paperwork errors happen, and data entry, since it requires human interaction, is not perfect either. In other words… Stuff happens.
If the policies and procedures are not to one’s liking, that is not a reason to cry foul either. The company has the right to establish policy at their discretion, within the confines of the law. If the policy breaks the law, then either the company has a poor legal team, or it could very well be a scam.
There are literally hundreds of different types of scams, but the most common of them all is the matrix scam. And this one is the one people fall for most often. Many companies running this type of scam refer to it as a powerline. This is a situation where a person is told that they need to buy a product, or pay a membership fee, and all those people that pay their way in after them will generate a massive income for them.
Or, they are told that if they buy product A, for what ends up being way more than it is worth, they will receive a prize of greater value, once they get a certain amount of others to buy product A, using the same promise of wealth. Both of these scenarios are similar to the pyramid, in that eventually, someone at the bottom loses everything (time and money), and receives nothing.