AUTO SURFING WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Here is summary of what you need to know about Auto Surfing

• In the world of marketing, people often get compensated — with cash or free products and services— for doing fairly easy things, like sampling new ice-cream flavors, filling out surveys, or allowing a firm to monitor the television shows you watch or the websites you visit.
• While some “money for nothing” opportunities may be perfectly legitimate, others can turn out to be frauds.
• “Auto-surfing” is a form of online advertising that purportedly generates advertising revenue for companies that want to increase traffic to their websites.
• The premise behind auto-surfing is that companies that advertise on the Internet are willing to pay to increase traffic to their web sites.
• These companies hire an auto-surf firm or “host,” which in turn pays individual web surfers to view certain websites on an automatically rotating basis.
• The more sites the individual visits, the more money he or she stands to earn.
• The program will promise high — often double or triple digit — returns on your investment in the program, often within days or weeks of joining.
• The line you’ll hear is that the more you click, the more you collect.
• But the reality is that any scheme that requires you to pay to participate — and promises handsome rewards in no time at all for little to no effort on your part — bears many of the hallmarks of a “Ponzi” or pyramid scheme.
• These schemes look deceptively legitimate because the fraudsters behind them typically use money coming in from new recruits to pay off early stage investors.
• But eventually the pyramid will collapse when it gets too big.
• It’s simply not possible to “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” forever.
• The SEC warns investors to be wary of any sort of “get rich scheme quick” scheme — and to be especially leery of opportunities that require you to pay to play.
• Contact the secretary of state where the company is incorporated to find out whether the company is a corporation in good standing.
• Also call your state securities regulator to see whether the company, its officers, or the promoters of the opportunity have a history of complaints or fraud.
• Watch out if the company’s promotional materials, contain “testimonials” from supposedly satisfied customers, especially if all the “testimonials” are full of praise.
• Every investment carries some degree of risk, and the level of risk typically correlates with the return you can expect to receive.
• Low risk generally means low yields, and high yields typically involve high risk.