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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

For all my fellow freebie hunters...

I just wanted to share some advice I was given about freebies, how to spot the good things from the bad things, the fake offers from the good offers.

If you're on a page that claims to be giving away a freebie and you notice there are a ton of Google ads, yes some sites use them for advertising to help support their site, but 9 times out of 10, a freebie site caked in google ads is a bad thing, more of a way to collect spam information and you'll never see a thing in your home mailbox with the promising freebies.

If the webpage is hosted on a free hosting site more than likely this again is a bogus freebie. If you go to the root of the site you can tell if it's on a free hosting site or not.

If the legal disclaimer (normally found on the bottom of the page) doesn't fit the site then it's bogus, read the legal disclaimer, something like x site is not affiliated with x company in anyway is usually a key trigger that freebie is bogus.

If you look at the email contact (if their is one) and its a gmail, or yahoo, or other 'free' email address, again, you're being fooled.

Why do people do this? Why do they claim to give you X item for free if you 'fill out the form' and then it never comes, well there are a few possibilities, they're either trying to get enough traffic to get revenue from their google ads, they just want to see how gullible people are, or they're collecting spam information even if they don't ask for your email address 'junk mail' via snail mail is still around!

So be on the lookout for these few things when trying to determine if the page your at is actually giving you a great freebie or just wasting your time. I really try my hardest to not post 'scams' like the above mentioned, but once in a while one gets past me as well, if you ever notice them please feel free to let me know!

2 comments:

Tara said...

Thanks so much for posting this information. I cannot stand it when I think its a cool deal then i realize its SPAM grrrr

Rose said...

Another tip for spotting a scam is if it says anything in a disclaimer like "participation required." Those usually have you spend an hour filling out stuff and wasting your money, only to give you no freebie.