Work From Home Scams: Analyzing Free Trial Offers

There will always be news about credit cards intertwined with security issues, scams, complaints and that sort of stuff. The latest of which includes last month’s reports on how Visa has shut down its payment processing services to some marketing companies. The reason? It’s a violation of merchant agreements wherein it was reported that those companies offered free trials or products to their customers but included and stated in the fine print that they will charge from the customer’s credit card account huge amounts of monthly subscription fees. Knowing that most people don’t read fine prints, this was only discovered after some time. This triggered numerous complaints and eventually led to Visa’s decision to shut down its services to those companies involved.

After reading the paragraph above, you would assume that this huge move from Visa clearly indicates that they don’t condone abusive, fraudulent and scam-related acts pertaining to their services. While we really don’t have the exact details, this leaves us with one thing to learn and that is to be more careful when dealing with these kinds of offers. Free trials of products, whether software or physical, is an expected marketing strategy from the sellers and merchants that flock the Internet today. It’s quite an effective tactic since most folks enjoy getting freebies and stuff. Well, who doesn’t? But that doesn’t mean you should get your hands on any free stuff that pops up before you.

People who work from home should know better than to fall for these “free trial” scams. Here’s three things that you can do avoid being a victim of such deception:

Think twice. Heck, not just twice. Maybe, thrice, four times, five times, maybe more. Like what they always say, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. There may be a bunch of legit free trial offers out there but you can’t dismiss the fact that there could be more bogus ones. A lot of factors need to be considered so if you really think it through, you’d come up with a more solid decision.

Investigate. The Internet is at your fingertips so there’s no excuse why you shouldn’t be using it to thoroughly research and investigate certain offers that you are skeptical with. For example, it has come to your awareness that there’s an offer on a certain product and you can try it for free but you have to pay for the shipping cost. That seems to be a pretty decent offer. However, before you decide, one thing that you can do is to look up in Google the company behind that offer or the offer itself and see if there are negative feedback or issues that you can find or any information that can help you with your decision-making.

Know what you’re getting into. You thought you’re just getting a product and that you’re only paying for the cost of shopping. But alas, you discovered after some time that they are charging you for some monthly subscription fee, which you know nothing of until you have actually read the fine print and that it was stated there. Although it may be hard and quite uncool to read the fine print and the terms, you may as well do so because if you really want to prevent these things from ruining you or your work from home and robbing you off your hard-earned money, you should know what you’re getting into.