By time you discover what has happened, you could be left holding bag for thousands of dollars in debt. Your credit rating will be destroyed and you might have to deal with legal problems and bill collectors for years to come.

The moral of story is obvious. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. And, it should be obvious that Nigerian Scam is an attempt to involve you in a fraudulent act. If you lie down with this dog, expect more than just fleas. Expect to be spayed or neutered!

Hot Stock Tips and Oil Strikes

These have been showing up in my mail box for past few months now. Again, this is an effort to prey on weak minded and vulnerable people. When someone out of a job, or in need of a quick fix to a financial problem, reads this, they figure, "what heck, things can't be worse than they are now." WRONG!

If you send in your credit card information, You are a fool! You and all of your hard earned money will soon be parted. The same with New Mexico Oil Strike. Does anyone really believe that companies like Halliburton need your thousand dollars to process supposed largest oil strike outside of Persian Gulf?

One more thing about these two scams. Be careful when you click on OPT-OUT links at bottom of page. A couple of these scammers have gone to new heights to steal your personal information. Their Opt-Out links actually lead to a data collection form.

You are led to believe that tyou need to complete form in order to opt out. Actually, your info was just stored in a data base, and you can expect to receive several more spams/scams, only now, you really are Opted In and spam filters wont be able to stop this trash from arriving in your mail box.

Conclusion

Spam Filters are terrific tools, I just wish they could filter out scammers and let legit stuff through. Until technology can be developed to point where it can distinguish between honesty and flim flam, We will all have to be on our guard. Use a bit of common sense when opening your mail. Be careful with opt out links. They should be simple and automatic. Never give data of any kind to someone you suspect of being illegitimate. And finally, get your sexual kicks with your significant other. Leave that trash completely alone and spend your on line time in pursuit of more important things. Earning a second income, writing an article, or learning how to build your own site come to mind.

It's a license to steal! It really is. Here's why:

Site Match isn't a true pay-per-click program, like Google's Adwords or Overture's own pay-per-click program.

What's difference? With Site Match, you don't have any control over how much you pay for a particular keyword. I'll talk more about that later.

Site Match charges you $49 to "review" your URL, at which point you get included in databases of several search engines, including new Yahoo! search engine. By way, paying $49 annual fee doesn't improve your page ranking one iota.

It's also important to point out, this isn't same thing as Yahoo!'s Submit Express,where you have to pay $300 to have them review your site for possible inclusion in their directory, without any guarantee whatsoever.

With Site Match, you're guaranteed that your URL will be included in their various databases, and will be spidered regularly. This is how it works: If your listing is shown for a particular query and someone clicks on it, you get charged an additional 15 or 30 cents--over and above $49 annual fee! That's one reason why I call Site Match a license to steal. Here's another reason:

If your URL already happens to be in search engine databases, you're now paying money for clicks you would have previously gotten for free.

It's really a bad deal, because for most sites, paying more than $.10 per click will end up costing you money.

If you've participated in a true pay-per-click program, you already know that there are many keywords, especially generic terms, that are worth little or nothing, so you'd never bid on them to begin with--or you'd bid very low.

But with Site Match that control is completely taken away from you because, way program is set up, you have to pay a minimum of $.15 to $.30 per click, no matter what.

Personally, I think you should avoid Site Match like Bubonic Plague!

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net