Internet Scams
Along with every new method of communication comes the scammers that try to take advantage of the users of it. The internet is no different. Every day we are hit with web sites and email trying to rob us of our money by preying on peoples desire for wealth, fame, a better body, bigger parts of one's body or any other number of personal goals.
Web Site Scams
Web sites are all over the internet, and with some incredible effort is taken to promote these scams via legitimate marketing tactics such as purchasing ads on legitimate systems such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Publishing Network and others. Typically these sites convince you that they have the one and only top secret technique to accomplish whatever the goal is.
More often than not web site scams revolve around getting rich with little or no work on your part. I have followed a couple of these systems as far as I could go for free and ended up with "free sites" much like this one for Affiliate Project X which is supposedly the absolute best answer for how to make loads of money by affiliating with people that sell other products. Affiliate programs run like any reseller or MLM scam does. You agree to pimp their products and when you sell some you get a commission on the sale. So, this type of scam does require you actually put some effort into selling their stuff. I have yet to get one penny from the above site, but, then, of course, I put no effort into promoting it either...their promotional secrets (beyond common sense stuff) is where the cost comes in. But hey, they made me the site for free, so it's all good, right?
Email Scams and Spams
Email is probably the single most abused form of communication around. Mostly, I presume, because you can contact thousands of people in seconds for free.
Email scams are more aggressive, web sites you can ignore, spam comes right into your inbox and you have to deal with it. Spam filters are pretty good, but you still often have to inspect the spam results because there are still a lot of false positives.
If anyone in email asks you for ANY personal information, it's a scam. No legitimate organization ever asks for any passwords, account numbers or anything like that over email. If any email has links in it to follow to "update your account", make sure the URL of the text that is linked, and the URL the link actually goes to are the same. Often times URL will say paypal.com (or whatever) in the linked text but the actual link will go to an IP address which is a group of four numbers separated by periods, like 255.1.345.56, for example. Immediate red flag if that's the case.
Just use your head, the bottom line always is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.