Top 5 Get Rich Quick Schemes And Why You Should Avoid Them Like The Plague

Get rich quick schemes have been around for a long time, but they have multiplied and more opportunities have been created more recently through the Internet. Get rich quick scheme can look very attractive to housewives, disabled people unable to go out of their homes to work, unemployed people looking for ways to make ends meet, people getting little or no satisfaction from a full-time or part-time day job and even teenagers and college students who would like to improve the state of their finances. Here are a few of the most common get rich quick schemes that can be found on the Internet.

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing.

MLM companies allow you to buy products at wholesale price from the main company and resell at retail price; MLM distributors get paid a commission and also have the possibility of earning more commission through their downline. If you want to get rich quick with MLM, you must work very hard at getting recruits, who in turn get more people to sign up under them. Even though there are a few legal Multi-Level Marketing companies (Herbalife, Kleeneeze), there are also unfortunately a lot of MLM pyramid schemes, which pay participants for recruiting other distributors rather than selling a genuine product. Pyramid schemes are unethical and illegal in some countries.

Work at Home programs.

Some work at home programs include stuffing envelopes, assembling product parts, data-entry, etc. Some of these are legitimate but you will need to do a huge amount of work in order to earn a good income. A lot of work at home programs require you to pay a fee upon joining them; I would strongly advise anyone to steer clear of these as they are likely to be another form of pyramid scheme.

Gambling.

Gambling is illegal in some countries but if you live in a country where gambling is legal, be very careful: you can find a lot of so-called "safe" gambling systems which are sold in the form of e-books or software, and these are among the most dangerous as they give you a greater confidence and entice you to stake higher amounts of money; if you decide to gamble online or offline you must never bet more than what you can afford to lose, as there is always a possibility that you will lose it all.

High-Yield Investment Programs (HYIP).

Ah, the sound of 100% daily return or 500% weekly return for a minimal investment! Wouldn't you rather invest $100 and double your capital plus interest every day instead of doing some work? Don't you think that if these were true, everyone would be doing them and nobody would ever do an ounce of work in their lives? I can't even imagine the state our economy would be in! Of course these are a big fat scam (a form of Ponzi scheme) and are also illegal. Invest in a HYIP and chances are that you will never see your money again, never mind earning any interest this way.

Chain Letters.

These can now be done by email, which saves the sender a big amount of money spent in postage stamps. Chain letters can seem like an attractive way of making money and require less effort than through the postal system when done through the Internet. One popular example of a get rich quick chain letter in recent years claimed that the scheme had been endorsed by the Oprah Winfrey show and ABC's 20/20 investigation team: after sending $1 to the 6 Paypal email addresses featuring on a chain letter, it claimed that you could easily get $800, 000 in just 90 days. After replacing the last name and email address on the letter with your own, all you had to do then was post the new letter on some online forums and wait for money to arrive in your Paypal account. Of course chain letters don't work as they are usually broken in their early days and all they do is enrage postal workers and Paypal's administrators; money chain letters are in fact an illegal get rich quick scheme and participating in one could lead to your Paypal account being closed.

You can earn money in other ways than working a regular day job, but whether it is setting up your own online or offline business or joining legal online programs that require little or no investment, if you want to make money you must be prepared to work hard and long hours, as most get rich quick schemes are in fact just scams and there are no quick and easy ways to make money online or offline, even though that is what we would all like to believe. While the Internet is a great way for people around the world to communicate and get information, you need to be very careful about the kind of information you search for and before you join a program to make money online, make sure you read several reviews about it before you jump in.