International Trade Blog

Yes we all know that internet and global market can be very profitable and nowadays you can make money by trading with the whole world. But remember this: where there are opportunities for profit there is also fraud and scam. Not everyone who you might meet on the internet is the honest businessman. There are people in the world whose business idea is to scam other people and turn this into profit. Believe me as the global market is developing so do the scammers. So I will provide with some hopefully useful tips to avoid being scammed.

Let’s begin with my favourite scam – Congratulations you have inherited or otherwise obtained 20 or so millions of dollars from a Nigerian prince. Yeah you are rich; you just have to supply you bank accounts and maybe transfer a small amount of money to transfer the millions to you. Early retirement here I come! Well I at least hope you get my sarcasm, because there are no millions and probably never was a Nigerian prince and even if there was one ask yourself one question, why should he leave all his money to you? This is a total scam and if you have supplied  the data or transferred the money the best case scenario you should hope for is only to loose the small amount of the transferred money and not the whole bank account.

Another pretty profitable scam can be found in the global market for private person – Ebay. Of course as such it is a great place to find excellent bargain deals and acquire valuable objects, but you also have to remember that not everyone is as honest as you might be. The basics of a scam are very simple: you buy some product from a online seller and as it is common transfer the money (most often with PayPal). And then you got scammed, because the seller does not send you the bought item which in most cases only exists as a picture. Although there is a rating system in Ebay it can be cheated by opening several fake account and conducting ”business” between them. It may sound that Ebay is the worst place on earth to by something it is actually not. You just have to be careful which is the same how you should behave in a real marketplace.

Of course there are more types of scam and fraud in the world, but more about them some other time. But for now remember one thing if you have won some money or a lottery that you have not applied for more often then not it is a safe bet that someone is trying to scam you. Because be real who in the right mind would give away a lot of money for nothing in change.