Having just had another email get through my spam filter offering me money for typing into Google, I actually decided to look into this scam. The email itself was well-designed and had all sorts of stickers saying "As seen on TV", and "100% data certified". All looks very legitimate.

When looking to see if an email is from a trusted source or if it’s genuine, see if you can read the email without accepting the images. Spammers send out 1000s of emails. To ensure that their emails aren’t wasted on invalid or defunct email addresses, they incude tracking code on their image links. If you open the image, the spammer’s server can confirm you’ve seen the image, and so send you more emails. That’s why all these messages every where tell you ‘only to accept images from trusted sources’.

So, having used Google to try and make money myself (through the usual Google products - please click an ad on the right to make this work!) I was intrigued by how this scam could actually work. Who benefits from this scheme. It didn’t take much digging to find this which draws attention to many more more advanced scams than the simple email I received. The short of it is, that to sign up to make money, the company requires your card details (presumably so they can pay you). In one case, a woman was being charged $76 per month until she spotted it and cancelled it.

The ways to make money out of people are almost infinite. Nothing of cash value on the web is free. Don’t give out your bank details expecting any sort of return. Always check the email is coming from the place you expect it to by looking at the ‘from’ email address and looking where any links go before clicking them. Even if a link is printed out in full and looks legitimate, it can link elsewhere - if in doubt, copy and paste directly into your address bar.

This has been a public service announcement. :)

Edit: Just had a popup window with a fake news article with fake comments with every link pointing to another of these ‘make money with Google’ things. At the bottom it even says you can’t leave a comment yourself ‘Due To Spam’!