Money Making Schemes

Nagesh answers:

I’ve listed most of the sites I have taken surveys through and actually been paid (or received other rewards like gift cards or CD’S) on the following webpage :

http://www.windhavenweb.com/surveys…

I usually make about $20 a month from taking the surveys through those various sites, and if they have an affiliate program, I’m part of it, so I also make a commission when someone signs up through that link.

There are also scams out there you need to watch out for. Here are some tips to avoid them:

Don’t sign up for any survey site which asks you to pay to access the surveys. Also watch for language like “get paid for taking surveys AND SIGNING UP FOR OFFERS” if you don’t want to have to sign up for stuff with other companies to get paid.

Always carefully read their terms of service and privacy policy. If in their privacy policy they say they only use aggregated info, this is GOOD SIGN they are legit. Aggregated info information that is grouped together so it can’t be connected with anyones personal identification like name, e-mail, phone or address. That’s what survey sites SHOULD collect. Avoid sites that say they give, rent, or sell any personal information (info that is not aggregated) to third parties (unless you really don’t mind getting junk mail, telemarketing calls, and spam).

Also, never sign up for a survey through an unsolicited e-mail–since these might not even be from the site they claim to be, but could be a phishing scheme to get your information and mis-use it. And never give your credit card info–there is no good reason a legitimate free site would need it.

Here are two other sites which are very helpful
http://www.surveypolice.com/
(rates surveys)
http://ripoffreport.com/
(scam reporting site)

Nagesh answers:

It’s a scam – everyone who meets any scammer on a dating site will either get into a car accident or their child will end up in hospital. It’s one of the most common ways to get you to send money

1 -Nigeria has the National Health Insurance Scheme since 1999 so medical treatment is free in government hospitals. You can’t even get into a private hospital without having private insurance. In any emergency, patients are brought to public hospitals.
2 – If this person was foreign and working in Nigeria, he could not even get a visa without proof of private insurance. The sponsoring employer would normally offer private insurance to cover treatment in private clinics – that’s a standard part of any expat package
3 – a call to this person’s embassy in Nigeria will prove there is no such citizen by that name with a work visa, and no child in hospital. Any foreigner working overseas registers with their embassy. And every time a foreigner is admitted to hospital overseas, their embassy is immediately informed so they can contact family and friends.
4 – if this person was really overseas working and needed money, they couldn’t get help from their employer? Seriously – the only foreigners working in Nigeria are oil executive easily making $250k a year – they would never need to ask for monay. Even in a private hospital, the most expensive medical treatments would cost less than $1000 and that’s for open heart surgery that would cost $100k in the US

Want to confirm it’s a scam – write back to say that you called the emergency number at the embassy with his son’s name and hospital name and they are sending a consular attache to the hospital first thing in the morning to make sure his son is getting adequate treatment, make sure the hospital is not charging him for any treatments as he is covered by the national health insurance scheme, and will give him an emergency loan that you have guaranteed so he and his son can come home. No matter what excuse he comes up with, just say the embassy told you they are going to take care of everything and you don’t need to do anything

Read the State Department’s own warning about Nigerian romance scams
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/financial_scams/financial_scams_4554.html
“The scammer has incredibly bad luck– often getting into car crashes, arrested, mugged, beaten, or hospitalized — usually all within the course of a couple of months. They often claim that their key family members (parents and siblings) are dead. Sometimes, the scammer claims to have an accompanying child overseas who is very sick or has been in an accident.”

Nagesh answers:

Wow… Sounds interesting. I wish you could give more details. The best way would be to advertise that you are looking for investors; draw up a business plan with a detailed list of expenses and profit projections, market research etc.

The investor will be the silent partner while you will do all the work. You will agree on a profit sharing scheme and strict benchmarks for the realization of profits.

Otherwise, if you go it alone, cut down on your overheads. Do you really need office space? Why if it is web based?

Or, find an existing business that is doing something connected and ask to become partners. You use their office space and you offer your products to their customers; again, you will have to come up with a profit sharing plan.

Nagesh answers:

Paying a carbon tax does not and will not stop climate change. Climate change will happen no matter what. Humans may exacerbate it but we don’t cause it and we can’t stop it. This nonsense about paying money to be a bigger polluter is no different than the Catholic church offering Indulgences to its members: Little pieces of paper that, when bought from the church, will allow you to commit sins in advance without having to feel guilt about them. Do some research to see how well that worked out.

In today’s world, the “church” is the environmental lobby and their flunkies who stand to make mega-$$$ off this scam. People will buy the products they need from whomever can sell it the cheapest, therefore industries will vehemently oppose carbon credits at all costs while the environmental lobby tries to push them at all costs. We, the consumers, are caught in the middle, wondering where all this money is supposed to come from – read: our thin wallets – and how we’re going to pay our bills and feed our families in the meantime. The average citizen isn’t a power broker who stands to benefit financially from this money redistribution scheme, that happens for lobbyists and specially created gov’t positions that will oversee this shell game. As for the UN overseeing the legitimate conduct of this new self-perpetuating industry, well, if you believe that then you clearly haven’t read their track record on anything in the last 30yrs… Nuclear inspectors in Asia, women’s rights in the middle east, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Dharfur, the Durban Conferences, anything to do with Israel, Rwanda, Oil For Food…

Trying to force some corporations to pay more than others to exist based on their pollution ratio is only going to create an industrial backlash that will cost all of us in the end, and the environment will not be saved. The real issue of “what can WE do”, not businesses and politicians, but WE as people, will be pushed to back burner and lost in the shuffle. Spare me all this ‘environmental conscience’ claptrap and don’t bother me with this ‘what will we leave our grandchildren’ crap because really just about nobody really cares, it’s just a soundbite that desperate losers pull out when they have nothing else but to scream ‘Think of the children!!!’… Allow me to plant my carbon footprint up your whiny tailpipe and tell you that if you want to save the environment then try altering your own habits and stop being a blindly selfish sheep. Try applying some willpower and save yourselves the headache of crying for a state appointed nanny: Save yourself for once. Carbon taxes are a self-destructive scam that will accomplish NOTHING but to create a whole new class of the super-rich, promote unemployment and joblessness, and to grow an ever expanding body of poor and disillusioned.

Nagesh answers:

Absolutely not. Their number one problem is they don’t UNDERSTAND the Constitution (with the exception of a few–Ron Paul, Jeff Flake are the two who come to mind). Second, with few exceptions, they do not have even a basic understanding of economics. That’s why they’re taxing us to death while sending us into bankruptcy.

The hot topic is health care. Idiots claim Medicare is great. Really?
In the US, Medicare is going bankrupt. In 1998, Medicare premiums were $43.80 and in 2008 will be $96.40–up 120%. “Medigap” insurance is common because of the 20% co-pay required for service. Medicare HMOs are common because they reduce that burden without an extra charge in many cases. HOWEVER, many procedures which used to have no or a low co-pay NOW cost the full 20% for the HMO Medicare patient. ALSO the prescription coverage they tended to offer has been REDUCED in many cases to conform to the insane “donut hole” coverage of the feds. Doctors are leaving Medicare because of the low and slow pay AND because the crazy government wants to “balance” their Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors.
“That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors’ payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.

Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991.”
http://www.massmed.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=vs_mar05_top&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=11037

They want UHC–which doesn’t work anywhere. Here’s a form of UHC in the States NOW–called Medicaid:
Oregon’s at least honest about the FACT that ALL government health care IS RATIONED care:
“But the real-life story of 18-year-old Brandy Stroeder may come to embody a harsher truth: namely, that even as we perfect more and more advanced medical procedures, not everyone is going to have access to them. And, as Americans struggle to come up with an equitable health care system, that even the best-intentioned system can seem heartless when forced to balance the good of thousands against an individual’s suffering.

The story began last fall when doctors told Brandy, who lives with her single mother in a weather-beaten farmhouse about an hour south of Portland, Ore., that she was likely to die within a year unless she got a simultaneous lung-liver transplant, an operation that has been performed fewer than a dozen times in the United States.

Under Oregon’s unique Medicaid system, which openly rations healthcare in order to provide basic care to as broad a population as possible, Brandy was eligible for a liver transplant or a lung transplant, but not both. In January, and again after a review in May, the state-run health plan said no. There wasn’t enough data to show the $250,000 procedure was worthwhile, the health plan’s administrators said, and the plan didn’t cover experiments.

But Brandy wouldn’t take no for an answer. A tough, determined young woman who had managed to work part-time at a photo studio, baby-sit her boss’s children, coach the high school football team and maintain a 3.2 grade point average between numerous and prolonged bouts in the hospital, Brandy wasn’t about to give up her life without a fight. She sued the state of Oregon, charging that it was making a flawed moral choice in refusing to save her life. Since then her caustic, articulate criticisms of the Oregon system have given a vivid sense of the obstacles any universal healthcare plan for the nation would face.

“They’ll pay for an alcoholic to get a liver transplant because they’ve been drinking all their life,” she says, sitting with her mother at a rickety picnic table under a cherry tree by her front door. “They’ll pay for a heroin addict to get cured, to help someone kick the cigarette habit. Those are things people do to themselves. If you put it to a vote the people would say pay for some girl’s operation instead of some alcoholic’s liver transplant or some crack head’s needles. I just think it isn’t very fair.'”
http://archive.salon.com/health/feature/2000/07/07/brandy/

Texas has also been the boldest in supporting the growing-in-popularity “futile care theory”:
“Texas, however, has become ground zero for futile-care theory thanks to a draconian state law passed in 1999 — of dubious constitutionality, some believe — that explicitly permits a hospital ethics committee to refuse wanted life-sustaining care. Under the Texas Health and Safety Code, if the physician disagrees with a patient’s decision to receive treatment, he or she can take it to the hospital ethics committee. A committee hearing is then scheduled, all interested parties explain their positions, and the members deliberate in private.

If the committee decides to refuse treatment, the patient and family receive a written notice. At that point, the patient/family has a mere ten days to find another hospital willing to provide the care, after which, according to the statute, “the physician and health care facility are not obligated to provide life-sustaining treatment.”

Since the patients threatened with death by ethics committee are often the most expensive to care for, it will often be difficult for families to find other institutions willing to accept a transfer. But the futility deck may be especially stacked against Houston patients. Many city hospitals participate in the “Houston City-Wide Guidelines on Medical Futility,” raising the suspicion that participating hospitals will not contradict each other’s futility decrees.

If so, this would mean that patients seeking refuge from forced treatment termination will have to be transported to distant cities, as has already occurred in a few futile-care cases, perhaps even out of state. Illustrating the level of hardball some hospitals play against patients and families, the Clarke family’s lawyer Jerri Ward told me that St. Luke’s agreed to pay the $14,806 transportation costs to transfer Clarke to a hospital in Illinois — more than 1,000 miles away — if the decision to transfer is made on Thursday (4/27). If the family doesn’t decide until Friday, the hospital will pay only one-half of the cost of transportation. Thereafter, it would pay nothing.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/smithw/smith200604271406.asp

I just love being robbed and then hearing sick people are told they’re not worth keeping alive. Yeah bureaucrats!

The list goes on, but with space limitations, that’s it.