11 Mar 09 How to spot a CraigsList scammer email
So you just posted an ad on CL and you get like 5 emails 10min later asking if the item is still available….SCAMMER.
So after posting things on CL for sometime i have come to learn what separates the real interest from the bots and broken down the detection methods by sections of the email. I haven’t listed the basic stuff that CL puts in every email about WesternUnion… but please don’t ignore that:
Body
1. If the email says “is this item still available” it’s a scam, why, well because, it doesn’t mention the item, the cost, and it’s the most common phrase in the scammer software out there.
2. If the body makes no indication as to what the item is…
3. If the body indicates an offer to pay more than the listed price, don’t be greedy
Subject
1. If the email includes the exact copy of a detailed description, it was probably copied by a bot so a subject like “D80 10MP, 17-55mm f/2.8, 70-210mm f/4″ is pretty much non human typed, You may think that people copy the item name and paste it into the subject, but they don’t they copy the email address to paste into their email client and sadly we have only one clipboard.
Name
1. This is a more intuitive thing, but if the name looks too random, it probably is. Remember, parent pick out names, nobody names their kid “dickey frank”, and most people don’t enter their name into an email app in all lower case. If you are unsure then do a white pages search, easy as that, if the person doesn’t exist in your city or state, then it’s a scammer.
Timing
1. if it comes in the first 5 min of posting the ad…
2. If you have multiple listings and get an email for each of them at the same time, it’ not an overeager customer, it’s a spammer.
Most of this stuff is common sense an you would only get sucked into it if you were (a) Really busy and not paying attention. (b)So greedy that you think that you can take advantage of your customers. If you are that busy, hire someone to sell stuff for you, and iff you are greedy, well it’s time to learn your lesson, simple supply(of scammers) and demand(greed).
-peace
ps: (i’m a bit greedy(i’ts human), but i’ve avoided the scammers so far)
15 Oct 07 "if you haven’t done it by the time your 17 you’ll never do it"
This line haunts me to this day, uttered by my 7th grade math teacher who’s teaching style made him the only teacher that i ever respected. (He did things like throw kids out of class, via the window; pretend to take ‘pills’ (mints); threw my slide rule back at me; pitched a cricket ball at top spin at the black board to wake everyone up; held a kid over the garbage can to make him pickup and eat his the lunch he wastefully chucked; gave me the day off when i aced tests; and finally called other teachers philistines) , hmm those things don’t really give him much credibility do they? It wasn’t a big deal to me when my 17 b-day passed but as time goes i on i get more and more worried that my time is out, especially when i see kids do amazing things like this, things i still dream of doing but never imagined were possible at 17:
joey(17) – world traveling commercial photog, with people skills and business smarts (sells a $300 training book)
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/10/young-blood-chat-with-photographer-joey.html
and this 17 girl making $70k/month on myspace
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html
I feel like i am totally capable of doing these things but as time goes on i haven’t made them happen ( sounds like i need an infomercial or something ) at 17 i had the time and drive but i didn’t have the business sense or the people skills, over time I’ve rounded out my people and business ability but now i have precious little time.
Polyphasic sleep is looking good again, I’ve quit caffeine addiction (including chocolate) and aiming at minimizing meat, i exercise every day and would be able to nap at work, but while taking naps every 4 hours would give me 6 more hours of waking time a day it’s cost is 2 hours of time i usually spend awake with other people, and that is the hardest thing to overcome.
I’m sure that I’ll figure something out, so here’s to proving my math teacher wrong while still putting my people connections first.
02 Apr 07 Multi-Level Marketing / Network Marketing – Lies, Lies, and More Lies
What do most people tell you when they hear that “losing weight and making money can be had through Network Marketing“?
Lie #1: “it’s a scam!”
Truth: Not even close! Everyone that I’ve seen use Network Marketed Weight Loss Products have lost weight, often quite a lot too. And everyone that i’ve seen join Herbalife has made money even me.
Lie #2: “it’s Illegal / pyramid scheme”
Truth: Only if you don’t pay your taxes on all of the money that you make. Actually this is a throw back from a time when people sold business opportunities and made more money from the membership fees than the product sales royalties. It is an important distinction to make but if your going to join one of the big ones like Herbalife, Mary Kay, Avon they have already got a good reputation so you don’t have to worry about anything being shady. In fact some of them are publicly traded companies which means that they get very closely scrutinized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Check out the stock (NYSE: HLF), I wish that i had bought some.
Lie #3: “Only The people at the top, who got in early, make any money”
Truth: In most plans you start making money as soon as you start to sell and the amount that you make is only self limited. The residual income builds up a over time but every year is seeing More people qualifying for the big bucks then every previous year.
Lie #4: “It expensive and most people give up anyway”
Truth: These days the joining cost is way down, with Herbalife being one of the cheapest, and the retention rate is near 50% after 12months!
Don’t Believe me? Check my facts:
Wikipedia Entry on Herbalife
Wikipedia Entry on Multilevel Marketing
Believe Me? Click these
Home Business Solution
Weight Loss Solution
Online Mall
23 Mar 07 Reciprocal Love
So this week has been a week of reciprocal love on many fronts, not the least of which is my 4 year wedding anniversary. I was an active on the blogger/commenter and it paid off big time 40,000 hits and the front page of Digg(thanks to some rose-power), granted ‘content is king’ but a little back and forth goes a long way. I also got a special shout-out from a blog that I’m am a loyal fan of, Urban Monarch, thanks greg and cash. Articles got featured on LifeHacker, Strobist and a few others (see trackbacks below).
I’m not quite making ‘second life’ revenue on my ads but enough to take the family out to dinner, thanks again world (except Nascar fans. F1 Rulez!)
06 Nov 06 Blog Pimping/Monetizing Tools Reviewed
So I’m trying out a few blog monetizing tools i though i’d give a run down of my experience with them.
Of course the first that i tried was google because they have button in the blogger tool which allows you to just turn the ads on. I bumped it up a bit by adding some custom ones from their home page which were longer and more color matched. They do the whole associative / suggestive advertising selection which is great because i don’t get ads for diapers or something embarrassing on my suave and manly site, but i think that this might also be a down fall, because i think that the demographic that reads my blogs is represents the least likely people to even read the ads. I need some Nascar loving, cheese curd eating, niche market, baby bouncing, self help seeking ads, but with my content, it’s not likely to happen. In fact the biggest problem is that the ads that i see on my blog are to well targeted to me that i want to figgin click on them.
The next type of tool that i tried is amazon affiliates, they have a similar html generator which makes it pretty easy to use. Their ads don’t seem as well targeted, but as i pointed out in the previous paragraph, that might be good thing. A few days after putting up amazon ads i saw that they had this tool for making a custom mall, this is great because you can pick the products and add a custom description without having to write any code. This is actually a great service because when a friend asks me what are the best headphones or camera or whatever, i can just sen them a link to my mall which has a review that already wrote and then i actually get a cut for making the suggestion, which beats recommending a product and not getting anything in return.
The final on that i have tried is text-link-ads this seems to be a competitor to google but they also have an affiliate system for referring other people who will put their ads on their pages. I just put this on today, seems simple enough, I wasn’t able to put actual ads on because they have to review your site first.
06 Nov 06 Blog Pimp – My way of paying google for all of the services that i use
If you have seen goog latest stock price and are not sure if its a justified value then you should look at its revenue, about 6billion in 2005, which is amazing sice i dont even know of anyone who has given them money yet just about everyone i know has used one or many of their services and many people who have recieved money from them, that represents an incredible value for money. I beleive that adding such huge value to society deserves to be rewarded by $500 stock prices.
Google services make up a significant chink of my productivity tools (this blogging tool is one of them) so i figured that the best way to pay them back is to use the service that makes them the most revenue. So in case you haven’t noticed, i am testing just about every blog monetizing tool that i come accross. Frankly i don’t find them too imposing, but then i rarely read my own blog (blatant lie). I have yet to make anything out of them but when i do i will let you know which ones are most effective, i kind of have a hunch who will come out on top.
Minneapolis St. Paul IT expert, technical problem solver, tinkerer.
