Scammers and Spammers, How to Avoid Them

Suze Orman over on Yahoo Finance has an article up, "Scammers and Spammers". With alliteration like that, she must be doing something right.

My friends, you need to be more paranoid with your money. It's absolutely sickening how many people are losing big bucks by falling for online spamming scams and telemarketing schemes. Identity theft seems to be the fastest growing industry in the U.S. And that's just the real criminal stuff. In my opinion you need to be just as afraid of handing your money over to any professional money manager, financial adviser, or insurance agent, without clearly understanding why they are making specific recommendations, what their compensation is, and, most importantly, whether they are any good. They may be legit, and they may even be backed by a large, well-known company, but that doesn't mean they aren't also incompetent or unscrupulous. And it's no better to lose your hard-earned money to a credentialed huckster than to an out-and-out con man. A rip-off is a rip-off, whether it is intentional or not.

She lists a series of things that appear to me to be just common sense - but clearly they are beyond that or we wouldn't need to remind people of these things. Hopefully Suze has a large enough readership that she can make some sort of impact in the teachings of common sense to people that are otherwise likely to fall prey to "scammers and spammers".

Posted by Eric at September 10, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBack