I watched an info commercial on late night TV. I sent in for the $40.00 package. It cost $65.00 including postage and handling. The big plan of making millions did not work. Tried to get a refund, then found out that the credit card was billed for $40.00 recurring billing. In some instances, the credit card got charged for $6,000 dollars for a mentoring service.

Sounds familiar? It happens all the time. I remember the first time I got into this internet business, I ordered Internet Treasure Chest for $39.95 and found out the next day on the internet that the company is being sued by many people for being a fraud. I never got the money back but just moved on considering it another lesson.

There are many scams like that on TV and on the internet. The first thing you have to know is the reputation of the company that you are dealing with. You can type in search query "complaints against xxx company" and you will probably find some complaints against most companies especially if they sell a product on the late night TV. Even Paypal was in a multi-million dollar class action law suit for freezing people's accounts and Publisher Clearing House was fined many millions of dollars for misleading people about entering their sweepstakes.

This is America, folks, the land of opportunity and many companies push their limitations to make more money till enough people complain against them,and inevitably the courts step in and then they clean up their act. But then again, it's the voice of the people that keeps them honest.

Every day I get emails claiming that there is a way to make a lot of money easily, and inevitably they turn out to be scams. I usually do a back ground check on anything I want to invest money in and that includes hours of research on the internet and sometimes consulting Who Is to find out who the website is registered to and so forth.

Not to mention those countless emails from Nigeria claiming that they have access to millions and even Paypal scams that tells you to do chain mail which is actually a class five felony. How about those phishing scams that ask for your credit card information and password on a fake site.

I'll bet there are a lot of legitimate companies out there, many of them reputable, but it's the few that turn out to be scams that give businesses a bad reputation, especially in the field of real estate and start your own website kinds of businesses.

The only thing we can do as consumers is to beware and research these companies before we spend our hard earned money on something that we are not sure of. There are a lot of websites like FraudListings.com and Scambusters.org that cater to people interested in scams and complaints that exist on TV or internet and it may do well to do some research on certain companies before you reach for that almighty credit card or check book. A word of prevention may be worth a pound of cure,so to speak.