Website Marketing Club

How to Avoid Problems When Advertising Online

Nov 17, 2009 Advertising

Placing an online advertisement has five common risks. They are explained below, with simple steps on how to avoid them.

1) Buyer does not pay

One of the biggest problems is that the buyer does not pay you for the product or service which you have advertised for sale. Before sending anything to the buyer, you should ensure not only that payment has been received but also that it has cleared and been deposited in your account. This should be done for all types of payment, including bank cheques and credit cards.

For items which are sent by post, a related issue is buyers who claim that they have not received the item and consequently refuse payment or demand a refund. The vast majority of such claims are false but proving this is difficult unless the goods are sent by registered mail. Consequently, one needs to balance the additional costs of registered post against the risk of fraudulent claims of non-delivery.

2) E-Mail Theft

To place your online advertisement, you will need to provide a contact EMAIL address. Unfortunately, there are various software programmes which collect EMAIL addresses from websites. They may get this direct from your advertisement, or breach the website security and steal it direct from the website databases. Alternatively, some programmes randomly complete the advertisement contact forms and send off messages, so that when you reply your EMAIL address can be collected from your reply.

Once they have your EMAIL, they can use it for SPAM or for fraudulent messages, or sell it on to other people who misuse it. To avoid this, one should never use a business or personal EMAIL for online advertisements. Instead, one should obtain a temporary EMAIL from the various free EMAIL services, and use this for the advertisement. Once you’ve sold the advertised item, you can cancel the EMAIL account (something you would not want to do with your business or personal EMAIL address) and thereby avoid ongoing problems with spam or fraud EMAIL.

3) The Over-payment Refund Scam

In this scam, a buyer pays more than the price of the item and then asks you to refund the difference. For example, if an item costs $50, he may pay you $75 and ask you to refund the extra $25. There are many possible reasons that he may give for this, including that he overpaid by mistake.

In this scam, the original payment is fraudulent (e.g. counterfeit cheque or stolen credit card). The ‘buyer’ will simply disappear with any refund and since the payment to you will not clear, you will be out of pocket the amount of the refund. To prevent this, instead of refunding, cancel the original payment and request a new payment. Never ship goods or provide refunds before payments have fully cleared and been deposited in your account.

4) Private Meeting

This normally happens only on expensive items, such as real estate sales. The ‘buyer’ requires a meeting to finalize the deal, in a private setting (e.g. a hotel room) in a distant city. Depending on the exact scam, various things can happen if you go, such as your house being robbed while you are away or people trying to force money out of you when you’re are alone in private or an attempt to buy the item in cash (with counterfeit money).

In general, such meetings are unrealistic and one should immediately break off contact with the people. Nobody agrees to buy a property before ever seeing it and then insists on a private meeting in a distant city. However, if you do decide to go, do not go alone and insist on the meeting being in a public place such as a restaurant.

5) Theft of Identity Information

There are a number of scams in which the other person tries to get financial information about you (e.g. your bank account or credit card number), along with personal information so that they can use your identity to access your money or purchase items.

Many financial institutions have a small number of personal questions which they use to identify people. Typical questions include your date of birth, your full name (including middle names), your mother’s maiden name and so on. Consequently, if someone obtains this type of information from you, along with a bank account number or credit card number, they may be able to contact your bank or credit card company (by phone or through an online account) and pose as yourself.

They are a number of reasons which a ‘buyer’ may give for asking for this information. For example, they may ask your bank details so that they can transfer money to your account and then say they need the personal information for administrative or security reasons.

It is best not to provide either financial information or personal information to strangers. Instead, use a payment method (e.g. cheque or credit card) which does not require that you provide this information.

Doug Stewart develops and owns various advertising portals, with his latest project being Horses for Sale.

Tags: Advertising, fraud, internet, Internet Advertising, internet fraud, online, online advertising, online fraud, scam, scams