As someone who spends WAY too much time on Alibaba.com, I can be the first person to tell you that it can be hard to find the information you are looking for to
protect yourself from scams and fraud. The information you may need is sort of all over the place.
So when I find something that I think is worth sharing, I'll post it here.
Today's entry is from one of the forums and the title speak for itself. A good buyer on
Alibaba is someone who is a good businessperson, but also someone with a well-honed B.S. detector. And advice like this can help. The English is not perfect, but you can get the meaning.
Top Ten Signs of Online Fraud on Alibaba.com
1. Too much marketing terms
Home business opportunity: No experience required. No work involved. Earn $2000 in one week! It’s easy to spot these kinds of scams because they’re full of too good to be true promises. And, exclamation points, too. What job will earn you that much money in a week without having to have experience and NOT having to work at all? None. Nada. Zilch!
2. Too friendly email
I mean the intro part of the email. If an email from someone you don’t know starts with “Hello my friend”, “Dear friend”, and they weren’t filtered by your spam box, consider these emails not so trustworthy. This method of scamming is known as phishing or fishing for details or information that will put your financial security in danger.
3. Money Matters
It promises that you can make money online. But you have to pay that upfront, one-time fee first for some training materials. Shady!
4. Assembled Jobs
If a home based business opportunity requires you to assemble furniture or stuff envelops, these are generic but often overlooked signs of a true blue scam.
5. Country Representative Job Offer
Coupled with sign no. 2, if an email offers you a job as a payment receiver requiring you to deposit a check on their behalf or anything similar to that job description, you’re doomed if you reply.
6. Job Offer that Requires Your Picture to Get Hired
Unless you are applying as a model, which is not a form of online money making venture, someone who’s looking for, say, a virtual assistant and asks that she sends a picture is offering something suspicious. Lots of free job listing sites have these types of job posts. Be very, very careful.
7. Employer has no online presence.
If you are trying to win an online job but when you researched about the online presence of your would-be employer and there’s no trace of his name or his company, ask your employer about his company or his business first.
8. Presence of Pressure Tactics.
If the online business opportunity tells you that you will get a chance to win a anti-scam book if you sign up now or you can avail of an early bird discount, walk! Unless they’re coaching or consultancy services which are not direct ways to earn money online, you should not be subjected to these kinds of pressuring if the opportunity will really make you money.
9. Request from Employer or Sponsor that You Keep the Offer a Secret
Coupled with scam sign no. 2 and 5, if the email sender asks you to keep your transactions confidential just for any reason at all, red flag, red flag, red flag! They don’t want you to inform others that you are about to get scammed, of course.
10. Emails from Someone in Nigeria
Although many Nigerians who use Internet scamming as past time, have already figured out that lots of Westerners already know that they should not trust any email from someone in Nigeria, there are still those who are gullible enough to fall for these frauds.
Educate your friends and family who love to use the Internet. They can still be too busy checking their emails or MySpace pages to know these signs.
The initial phase of the transition went live on Aug. 15. Now members are able to opt out of most of the marketing and advertising e-mails sent by the company with a few mouse clicks, and without having to log on to the Alibaba.com website, a requirement of the old system. Unsubscribing is equally easy for non-members who find themselves in Alibaba's marketing crosshairs.