TechnologyInsanity.com

So far this 2012 has been hot, but also Paypal Scams have rushed through the internet like wildfire.

There’s many variations – sometimes they act like you received a payment – totally fake – to get you to click on a link and become infected. The next one is on Craigslist, where many scams seem to flourish. Anyway, they mimick the paypal email that says you received money for a product/service. You actually received nothing, but many people have fallen victim to this stunt.

Either

A. The person who gets the fake payment might ship out unpaid for merchandise.

B. The person will request you send money via western union to pay for shipping or something else.

You should always throw up the red flag when someone wants you to send money via western union. This is because western union isn’t reversible. If you get a payment for something through paypal, always check your account to make sure you actually received something.

Watch everything with paypal closely now – because these scams are running rampant.

#1 Install and configure ReCaptcha for your comments.

This is easily done with WordPress by using the WP-Recaptcha Plugin and setting up ReCaptcha with Google. If you have something else, you’re going to have to look it up.

#2 Get Akismet working by registering with them and getting your API Key.

Akismet can be free or you can donate to them. Akismet comes standard with WordPress but unfortunately a lot of webmasters don’t utilize it.

#3 Install the Stop Spammer Registrations plugin for wordpress

If you’re running WordPress. Otherwise, search for something that blocks IPs and e-mails based on stopforumspam and the other various honeypots.

#4 Add in a challenge question if the comment seems suspicious.

There are a few wordpress plugins that do this. One is conditional captcha, but there are others.

If a spam comment happens to get through all this, and occasionally it does from manual labor hired in india or other poor countries, just delete it like usual.

Ah, penny auctions. Do they provide deals? In some instances, yes they do. In others, no they don’t. Recently the penny auction industry has started to call themselves “Entertainment Bidding”.

Now, why would they do that? That’s mostly to protect themselves from individuals that think penny auctions are a guaranteed savings. They’re not. They’re on the same level as gambling, however if you like gambling, then penny auctions are a good legal way to gamble online.

So yes they can be fun and addicting. Yes they are “in the same league” as gambling. If you go in expecting anything else, you’re going to be disappointed.

Here’s how the process works.

1. You buy bids.

This depends on the site how much a bid costs and how much a bid is going to raise the price of an item. Sometimes the bid raises the price by 1 cent, other times it raises it by 10 cents. Each bid can cost $1 or $5, again this depends on the penny auction provider.

2. You bid on items on the website.

This is pretty much just a constant war with other bidders. If you’re the last one to bid you win, but each bid will extend the auction time. Everyone has to give up when you bid for you to be able to buy the item at that price.

3. You win or lose

If you lose sometimes, depending on the site, you can put what you bid towards buying the item. Some sites still don’t offer this option but most do now.

The “luck” factor.

If you get lucky and just happen to be the right bidder at the right time yes you can get the item for a discount.

The Competitive Factor

These bidding sites have gotten more and more competitive. There’s “Sharks” out there just like you’d find sharks at a casino. They want it to be known if you see their name they’re going to win no matter what. They’re willing to bid and bid and bid and bid. They will win. You will give up and lose. They will spend more than the item is actually worth just to win.

Is it fun?

If you think slots are fun then yes it’s fun. You have to set a budget just like you would at a casino though. If  you don’t you could end up losing more money than you’d like.

Be careful, have fun and maybe get some discounts, but don’t expect to win anything going in until you study some strategies with penny auctions and get up and running. There are people making money off penny auctions just like there’s people making money off poker or anything else, but you have to know what you’re doing. Check out Beezid, see if it’s something you’d be into. If not, just don’t bother with penny auctions. Simple as that.

I mean seriously. Come on now. Facebook just barely became profitable not long ago, and at the moment they’re still barely making money. Social media traffic is poor quality traffic and ultra hard to monetize, so it’s no surprise to me that the stock is sinking.

Unless Facebook comes with some kind of breakthrough idea to monetize social media, the stock will continue to plummet, because well, it’s just not worth much. Everyone seems to think social media is worth all this money but the truth is, people aren’t engaged, they’re not interested in your ads, they just want to have fun and not buy anything. It’s not like they’re reading a newspaper or even a blog. Ads in this situation, don’t work all that well, and if they want a $90billion worth then they need a different monetization strategy. The problem with that is – if you start charging for anything, and I mean anything… People might get fed up and just “travel” to another social media site.

It’s not like anyone is tied down to Facebook for some strange reason. On the internet, no one truly owns anything – the users decide whether or not your site is worth anything to them. You mess up – your traffic is gone. They go somewhere else.

To be honest, I thought about shorting Facebook the moment I heard it was launching. I knew it was going to bubble and burst, however I had no idea it was going to burst so quickly. Don’t buy unless it’s $2 or lower per share, and even then… Don’t buy. If they’re at $2 and suddenly come out with some innovative way to monetize social media without driving users away – then you can buy. Till then avoid it.