McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

Ranking the Riskiness of MTV Music Video Award Nominees

And the award goes to… Yung Joc and Nitty! The MTV Video Music Awards won't air until August 31, but the results from the McAfee SiteAdvisor "Most Dangerous Lyrics Sites" Survey are already in. So whether or not Yung Joc and Nitty take home one of the coveted "Moon Men" trophies at this year's VMAs, they have already outranked the competition by having the most hazardous lyrics to search for online.

While casting your vote for the best videos and watching the MTV awards show may be a fun and entertaining way to celebrate your favorite musical artists, searching for the lyrics to your favorite songs might leave you in a bit of a funk. (And we're not talking about explicit lyrics content.) With more than 22.3 million searches for lyrics terms being conducted each month (more on this later), this site genre is a prime target for malicious players. Unsafe lyrics sites pose serious dangers: browser exploits, Active X controls that install spyware or adware, excessive pop-ups, and links to other unsafe sites.

The McAfee SiteAdvisor Most Dangerous Lyrics survey ranks the MTV VMA nominees by the danger of their lyrics searches. After searching Google for each of the nominated artists and songs plus the word "lyrics," we analyzed the safety of the search results using McAfee SiteAdvisor's ratings database of 6.4 million popular Web sites.

The most dangerous lyrics search was for Yung Joc and Nitty's song "It's Goin Down," for which 70% of search results were rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor. Christina Aguilera's love profession "Ain't No Other Man," came in second with 60% risky results, earning her the title for Most Dangerous Female Video and Most Dangerous Pop Video. Tied with Aguilera for second place overall, Common's "Testify," and Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" also won for Most Dangerous Hip-Hop Video. On average, 36% of lyrics search results for the nominated songs were links to risky sites and all searches for the nominated songs returned at least one risky site on the first page of results. Green Day's "Wake Me When September Ends" returned the safest lyrics sites with only 10% risky results. Read the full results.

SOS (save our systems)

One of the most frequent search result offenders was Anysonglyrics.com, which appeared in searches for 22 of the 44 nominated songs. Anysonglyrics.com insists that its users install an ActiveX control from Zango – giving users Zango's pop-up ads and a Zango toolbar, as well as sending detailed information to Zango about what users search for and what web sites and pages users visit. The site attempts to justify this download by claiming that Zango allows the site's content to be free. But we think the Zango adware installation is misleading for a few reasons.

* The content at Anysonglyrics.com is already available elsewhere for free.
* Accepting Zango may give some users the false impression that money from Zango (and its advertisers) flows through to songwriters, in compensation for reproduction of their lyrics. Zango says "This website is free thanks to Zango … because it's paid for by advertising." But it's just not true: Zango's advertising payments do not flow through to the songwriters who wrote the words on the site. As best we can tell, Anysonglyrics pockets the money it gets from Zango; it doesn't pay that money out to songwriters or music publishers. We're not here to opine on the question of whether Anysonglyrics needs to pay for the lyrics it presents; the music industry says a license is required, and the EFF disagrees. But whatever the answer, Zango's inclusion doesn't help the legality of the Anysonglyrics site.
* Zango's adware and toolbar are completely unrelated to Anysonglyrics.com's content and functionality.

ActiveX controls are frequent nuisances on lyrics sites. Lyricsmine.com also requires the Zango-bundled ActiveX control to view the site's lyrics. The ActiveX controls that we've found on duble.com and lyricsandsongs.com were even more noxious. In our tests, these ActiveX control downloads included, ImIServer, IEPlugin, Roings, and istbar. Once users have visited these sites, Rihanna won't be the only one singing "SOS."

What's Left of Me… and My PC

Just as Nick Lachey mourns his marriage in "What's Left of Me," fans of the soulful stud may be singing a sour tune after searching for his lyrics. His lyrics search results included exploit site Lyricsandsongs.com. This site served excessive pop-ups, which on occasion breached browser security on our test PCs. VMA fans run a very high risk of landing on this site: Lyricsandsongs.com appeared in search results for 70% of the nominated songs, providing ample opportunity for user click through. Emp3world.com, found in our lyrics search for Shakira and Wyclef Jean's "Hips Don't Lie," also made unauthorized changes to our test PCs. Using a hidden iframe, emp3world.com attempted security breaches including cursor and WMF vulnerabilities. This allows malicious code to install a trojan downloader onto the system which can then be used to install other unauthorized programs. For these exploit-infested sites, simply browsing can be harmful to your system. Steer clear.

Who's been linking up?

Relationships between Web sites can help boost traffic. They can also make or break a site's safety rating. Lyrics sites are often rated red due to links to other dangerous lyrics and mp3 sites. Lyriczz.com, found in searches for Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" and Chamillionaire's "Ridin'," has a red link score for linking to other red lyrics sites, including duble.com and lyricsandsongs.com. Its link analysis also reveals that users are only a click away muzlyrics.com, which then links to malware site coolwebsearch.com.

Nothing to Sing About

Some of our previous surveys have assessed the dangers of searching for screensavers of American Idol contestants, summer blockbusters, and World Cup and baseball players. Our lyrics survey confirms our earlier findings that malicious activity often follows pop culture to take advantage of innocent fans. According to Yahoo!'s keyword selector tool, there were 5.1 million searches in June 2006 for the keyword "lyrics" and its top 100 variants. Since Yahoo! search accounts for 23% of all searches, we estimate that there are over 22.3 million total searches per month for lyrics search terms. It's no wonder that scammers have invaded the lyrics space.

The prevalence of dangerous results found in popular lyrics searches is alarming, but music fans need not abstain from searching for their favorite prose. SiteAdvisor's ratings show can help steer users to safe lyrics venues. Stay in control of your PC as you gear up for this year's VMAs. Let the show's celebrity antics and wild outfits supply the shock value instead.

Red Carpet, Red Sites

Chart 1: MTV MVA: Top 10

Chart 2: MTV VMA: By Nominee

Chart 3: MTV VMA: By Category

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Are screensavers really a problem?

For a parent, there's nothing quite like watching your monitor morph into a Power Ranger as the screensaver kicks in. Little Jimmy or Janey's been downloading software again! If only it were all fun, games and kung-fu.

We in the technical community are aware that screensaver downloads often come with potentially unwanted programs. Yet typical consumers conduct 15 million searches for screensavers every month. The problem, in our view, is that the screensaver "freebie" often comes with adware strings attached. And it's not just consumers. Major advertisers continue to use adware vendors. Remember the recent episode with Warner Bros. and Zango?

Using SiteAdvisor data, we decided to measure the prevalence of adware distribution on sites distributing screensavers associated with kids TV shows. The results were not pretty.

Kids TV Shows graded by the safety of their screensaver searches

We counted 318 children’s television programs currently airing on English language networks in the United States. We decided to search for screensavers for each of these shows to see how risky it is to put a Rugrat, a Powerpuff Girl or a Flintstone on a desktop.

Each of the three aforementioned programs all returned 50% or more risky sites on Google’s first page of search results. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A staggering 85% of all kids TV show screensavers searches returned at least one dangerous site on the first page. 20% of all shows returned search results where half or more of the sites were risky. A child or parent who searches for a Gilmore Girl or Kenny the Shark screensaver and clicks randomly on the results has a 60% chance of landing at a risky site.

The Center for Exploited Cartoon Characters

SiteAdvisor rates sites red and yellow for a variety of security threats and annoyances including spyware, viruses, pop-ups, e-mail practices like spam, scams and browser exploits. What follows are the 50 most risky shows to search for, ranked by the percentage of links to red and yellow sites found on the first page of Google search results.

Rank Television Program Risky Sites 1 Power Rangers 81.8% 2 Ren and Stimpy 80.0% Rugrats 80.0% Yogi Bear 80.0% 3 Smurfs 72.7% 4 2 Stupid dogs 70.0% All Grown Up 70.0% Boy Meets World 70.0% Hey Arnold 70.0% Phil Of The Future 70.0% 5 All That 66.7% Pokemon  66.7% Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 66.7% 6 Cow And Chicken 63.7% Kenny The Shark 63.7% Little Bear 63.7% 7 7th Heaven 63.6% 8 Gilmore Girls 61.5% 9 Berenstain Bears 60.0% Cabbage Patch 60.0% Courage The Cowardly Dog 60.0% Full House 60.0% Jack's Music Show 60.0% Josie And The Pussycats 60.0% Justice League 60.0%

Rank Television Program Risky Sites Sabrina the Teenage Witch 60.0% Yu Yu Hakusho 60.0% 10 Mickey Mouse 58.8% 11 Bob The Builder 58.3% 12 Amanda Show 54.6% Croc Files 54.6% Curious George 54.6% Batman: The Animated Series 54.5% Powerpuff Girls 54.5% 13 Dora The Explorer 53.8% 14 Barney 50.0% Bear in the Big Blue House 50.0% Code Lyoko 50.0% Dexter's Laboratory 50.0% Dungeons and Dragons 50.0% Flintstones 50.0% Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends 50.0% Franklin 50.0% Huckleberry Hound 50.0% Jay Jay 50.0% Johnny Bravo 50.0% Kim Possible 50.0% Lilo & Stitch 50.0% One Piece 50.0% Popeye Show 50.0%

The full list can be found here. How unsafe are the screensavers for your child’s favorite TV show?

Go Go Mighty Morphin’ Screensaver Spyware

The Power Rangers franchise is a 13-year old mega-hit that currently airs on various Disney networks like ABC Family and Toon Disney. It’s also this survey’s most risky screensaver search – more than 80% of results link through to risky sites.



One first page “organic” (non-sponsored) link for “Power Rangers Screensavers” leads to starpulse.com (McAfee site analysis), a celebrity Web site that uses screensavers.com (McAfee site analysis) as its desktop theme provider.

Every time a starpulse user installs a program from screensavers.com, starpulse earns an "affiliate" commission. Screensavers.com then earns its own commissions by bundling an adware program called Starware (McAfee program analysis) and a tracking program called Relevant Knowledge (McAfee program analysis).



After we installed Starware, we noticed that the SiteAdvisor plug-in mysteriously vanished from Internet Explorer. Why? It could be intentional, or it could be some kind of toolbar incompatibility. But we’ve tested SiteAdvisor on systems with plenty of other toolbars, and we’ve never seen any other toolbar make our plug-in disappear. We then installed Starware with both SiteAdvisor and Google toolbars in our browser and both disappeared.

SpongeBob SquarePants Soaks Up Red

SpongeBob SquarePants is a highly rated show that airs on Nickelodeon. A crossover hit that also attracts adult watchers, the cartoon sponge starred in his own film in 2004, grossing $140 million internationally. This underwater phenomenon is also popular with adware vendors. Fifty percent of all first page screensaver searches for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants screensaver’ lead to red and yellow rated sites.

The Sketchy Five

appleblossomart.com (McAfee site analysis) is the first organic search result for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants screensaver.’ At first glance, the site appears to offer free desktop themes. Perhaps anticipating users’ skepticism, the site offers a link labeled "click to see why my Screensavers are free". But the resulting page inexplicably offers no information about the site, its business model, or why or whether its screensavers are free. Instead the page merely offers what appears to be a sincere request for donations to groups trying to find a cure for Fibromyalgia.

On the actual download page, Spongebob fans learn that “the first few downloads have advertising software which pay for the file storage and can be easily removed in Add/Remove programs.” It turns out that www.appleblossomart.com is a distributor of adware-bundled screensavers from ezthemes.com (McAfee site anaysis). Five unrelated programs are included with this screensaver.

Potentially Unwanted Program #1:



Potentially Unwanted Program #2:

Potentially Unwanted Program #3:

Potentially Unwanted Program #4:

Potentially Unwanted Program #5:

The Screensaver:

Some adults may take the time to learn about these programs. But children are especially vulnerable to blindly clicking “yes” at each prompt – then the family PC is infected with adware and worse.

Explaining our Report Card

This is our first investigation regarding children’s television TV shows, and some readers may be new to SiteAdvisor’s testing and rating methods. Here’s a brief synopsis:

We establish a Web site's rating by examining a wide variety of information. First, we evaluate a Web site's e-mail practices by signing up with a unique, one-time-use e-mail address and tracking what e-mail arrives at this inbox. Then, we download any files offered by the site and test them for adware, spyware, viruses and more. Next, we inspect the Web site to see if it employs annoying practices such as excessive pop-ups, and we analyze a site's links to find connections with other sites our tests flag as red. We also test sites for so-called "drive by downloads" or breaches of browser security. Finally, we combine our own review with user feedback.

For this survey we collected the titles of 318 kids shows airing on the following networks: ABC Family, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Disney, Fox’s 4Kids TV, Kids WB, the N, NBC, Nick GAS, Nick Jr., Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Noggin, PBS Kids, TLC, and Toon Disney. We then added the word 'screensaver’ to each title (e.g. 'Dora the explorer screensaver'), and we ran each phrase through Google. We ranked the results by the percentage of first page listings pointing to red or yellow rated sites. We weigh sponsored and natural links equally. (Research indicates that typical users make no distinction between the two types of results.)

We acknowledge some limitations with this survey. We limited our search to Google, and we only checked one page of results. We did not use common Google "hacks" like putting names in quotes to improve accuracy. And we recognize that people use many different keyword combinations in search of the perfect screensaver, combinations that yield safe site percentages both higher and lower than the ones we report today. We ran these names on August 9th, 2006. Because search engine results change frequently, a user searching today using our software is likely to find different results.

That's Not All Folks

The news isn't all bad. The Warner Bros.-Zango episode we mentioned earlier was brought to a succesful conclusion by the power of the Web:

Three months ago, Jimmy Daniels at RealTechNews posted that Warner Bros. was promoting Zango (previously known as 180Solutions) when users requested WB’s kids content. Chet Faliszek of blog Donotreply.com followed up the next day by pointing out that the site’s terms and conditions include the following gem:

“Please note that you may receive Adult-oriented ads…”

Faliszek helpfully suggested that users digg the post. Flash forward 10 weeks. Daniels stumbled on the digg entry. One day and some 5,000 diggs later, Brian Krebs, security columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that Warner Bros. decided to sever its relationship with Zango.

Chris Boyd at Vitalsecurity.org wrote up Zango’s entanglement with Dollavs.com, an avatar site focused on kids. The domain now appears to be parked. And SiteAdvisor advisor Ben Edelman wrote about Zango products delivered via dollidol.com.

SiteAdvisor has written about the complexity of privacy policies of children’s Web sites and the use of free smileys to encourage adware downloads. For what it’s worth, Zango denied that its now-severed Warner Bros.’ relationship had anything to do with kids. In fact, according to their marketing policy: "Zango has a long-standing policy against marketing our software to anyone under the age of 18."

The bottom line: protect your computer from being squashed by an ACME anvil. Install our free McAfee SiteAdvisor browser plug-in, and tell your children that red means no and green means go.

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Earlier this month, AOL posted a list of 20 million search queries made by 650,000 of its users. In response to consumer outcry (Examples: 1,2,3,4,5) , AOL removed the posting -- but not before identities were revealed, privacies compromised, and embarrassing revelations made.

As if it couldn't get any worse than AOL users’ loss of privacy, these users also turned out to be searching for some of the most dangerous words on the internet. Let us explain.

Last week, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal pointed out that "free" was the most commonly used word in search queries. The popularity of the word "free" underscores our assessment of the risks of web search. Our study of The Safety of Search Engines found that search terms containing the word "free" were among the most dangerous queries, often returning a very high percentage of risky results. For example, the most dangerous search term in our study was "free screensavers." On average, across the five top search engines, 57% of search results for "free screensavers" were rated red or yellow by SiteAdvisor. Yahoo! returned 72% risky results. "Free ringtones" was the seventh most dangerous search term with 35% risky results.

The following table shows 13 search terms containing the word "free" that we found to be amongst the 5% most dangerous terms.

Often, so-called "free" items are anything but free. Free screensaver and games sites are notorious for bundling spyware and adware with downloads. In our tests, downloads on aaascreensavers.com and totallyfunfreegames.com, for example, included unrelated programs from WhenU and Zango. Free e-card sites often share users' e-mail addresses with third parties and can lead to a never-ending influx of spam. After submitting our e-mail address to e-card site funnyreign.com, for example, we received 1,075 spammy e-mails per week as result. Ringtone sites frequently lure consumers with misleading offers of free tones that ultimately lead to automatic enrollment in paid subscriptions. There are even sites that charge users for free programs. Freedownloadhq.com charges $37.95 for the free browser FireFox. They claim to offer technical support, but our review found their customer service to be severely lacking.

Gomes' analysis of AOL's search data also finds dangerous terms like "lyrics" and "music" to be among the most popular search queries. Our study found that search terms containing the words "lyrics" or "music" returned results that were 16% risky on average and even higher for some terms. For example, searching Google for "mp3 music download" returned 35% risky results. Unsafe lyrics and music sites are often plagued with nasty bundled downloads, risky ActiveX controls, and deceptive sales offers.

The correlation of search term popularity and search term riskiness illustrates how malicious activity tends to follow and exploit consumer behavior. Users demand "free," and bad actors flock to fill corresponding search results with their deceptive offerings. All too often, users don't realize the detrimental consequences of these sites until their systems crash from spyware or their inboxes become choked with spam.

But even though results for popular search terms are frequently riddled with scammers, our ratings show that there are safe sites in even the most dangerous categories. See our listings of safe screensaver sites, safe games sites, safe p2p sites and safe giveaway sites. With McAfee SiteAdvisor, users can find freebies that are truly free.

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In response to PC Mag's recent review of McAfee Total Protection, we'd like to address some of Neil Rubenking's comments regarding McAfee SiteAdvisor. We respect Neil as a disciplined and thorough software reviewer and reporter. As such, we have been proud of his previous positive review of SiteAdvisor and his advocacy of SiteAdvisor as a PC Mag Staff pick. Neil continues to support SiteAdvisor; in an e-mail to us today he said: "I recommend SiteAdvisor - I run it on my own systems." But a few statements from today's review require some clarification as they primarily reflect differences in philosophy rather than potential program flaws.

Neil checked McAfee SiteAdvisor's rating for 28 sites he deems to be malicious: eight keyloggers, four rogue anti-spyware sites, and 16 spyware sites. Of the 28 sites, he notes that only 11 of them are rated red by SiteAdvisor: the four rogues and eight of the spyware sites (that's 12 by our count).

We'd like to address the other 17:

SiteAdvisor has chosen not to rate commercial keyloggers red. We believe users don't need to be warned about downloads that are clearly marked as keyloggers and are downloaded for that explicit purpose. For example, users do not need to be warned when they are actively looking for monitoring programs from sites like Spectorsoft.com. Spectorsoft.com is even a PC Magazine editor's choice, so it's rather ironic that PC Mag would criticize SiteAdvisor for giving a green rating to a site that they actively recommend to consumers.

Spyware scanners, on the other hand, should detect and flag keylogging programs in case users are unaware of their existence on their PCs. SiteAdvisor warns users about unwanted programs that "sneak" onto users' computers. Therefore, by our philosophy, Neil's eight keyloggers should not be red.

Of the sixteen spyware sites Neil tested, eight were marked red by SiteAdvisor, one was yellow, six were grey, and one was green. A yellow icon encourages users to exercise caution, but implies less severe security problems than a red icon - this is just a matter of degree. A grey icon simply means that a site has not yet been tested. There will always be some sites that are bots are yet to crawl, but rather than rate them green by default, SiteAdvisor clearly lets users know that these sites are still unrated. Neil makes a valid point in calling out the grey sites, although the existence of grey sites has generally not been a source of concern voiced by SiteAdvisor users. The green rated site here is perhaps the only misrated site. Since we were not provided with the specific list of sites Neil used in his tests, we can't adequately address this discrepancy. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, one misrated site is a far cry from the 17 that are implicated in Neil's article.

We realize that there will always be differences of opinion when judging Web site safety. This is why McAfee SiteAdvisor's ratings are backed by publicly available data on our site report pages which are further enhanced by user and Web site owner comments. We welcome the debate. We'll admit when we're wrong, but we also stand by our ratings and philosophy.

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Time Magazine Picks McAfee SiteAdvisor for "50 Coolest Websites"

A brief diversion from data driven stories. This week, McAfee SiteAdvisor joined Digg, YouTube, Zillow and 46 others to make up Time Magazine's "50 Coolest Websites" list. From Time:

How do we select our finalists? We evaluate hundreds of candidates—some suggested by readers, colleagues and friends, others discovered during countless hours of surfing. Many of this year's choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips.

According to Time, McAfee SiteAdvisor:

...aims to keep you out of trouble — or, to be precise, stop you from clicking through to websites where spyware, worms, and other cyber threats lurk...Why would you need this? Because simply clicking through to a suspect site can wreak havoc on a PC, and risky sites comprise a growing portion of search returns.

We couldn't agree more. Thanks, Time.

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Are you spam savvy? Can you tell which Web sites will respect your personal information? Can you tell which ones might sell or rent your e-mail address to spammy third parties? Take our Spam Quiz to find out if you can spot a spammy Web site before your inbox suffers the consequences.

Similar to our Spyware Quiz which revealed that users have an extremely difficult time distinguishing between safe sites and sites littered with spyware, our Spam Quiz sets out to determine whether users can tell which sites employ unsafe e-mail practices. The quiz asks users to judge the e-mail practices of sites in popular categories (free games, e-cards, sweepstakes, credit cards, scholarships, online dating, jokes, and petitions) that often request user e-mail addresses.

The stakes for failing the quiz are high. Registering with all eight of the quizzes' unsafe sites resulted in 2,697 e-mails per week in SiteAdvisor's test inboxes. That's 140,244 e-mails per year! Signing up at the worst site in the quiz resulted in 1,075 e-mails per week and the average unsafe sign-up resulted in 337 e-mails per week. The vast majority of e-mails received contained highly commercial content from third parties.

It's difficult to judge whether or not a site is trustworthy. It's also hard to determine which Web sites are responsible for the spammy e-mails users ultimately receive. Sites often share e-mail addresses with third parties, so the spammy e-mail senders may be entirely different from the sites where a user submitted an e-mail address. SiteAdvisor tests a Web site's e-mail practices by using a unique, one-time-use e-mail address for each submission. Any e-mail that arrives in this unique inbox can therefore be tracked back to the Web site where the e-mail address was originally submitted.

In response to the torrent of spam over the years, many users no longer register for anything outside of their Citibank-eBay-Amazon comfort zone. Others create throw away accounts using Webmail providers like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. But we believe that users shouldn't have to limit their online activities for fear of receiving spam. As our tests show, there are many sites that DO respect e-mail privacy. Users just need to know which ones. With the availability of McAfee SiteAdvisor, easy to understand, useful information about each site you visit (how many e-mails received, what types) is now freely available.

Do you know which sites you can trust with your e-mail address? Take our Spam Quiz and find out.

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This week McAfee SiteAdvisor reached a new milestone to better support our many users around the globe. SiteAdvisor software downloaded from www.siteadvisor.com now includes multi-language support for an initial group of languages including Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Japanese. Additional languages will be rolled out in the near future. The language used by SiteAdvisor’s software is based on the language your computer’s operating system is set to use.

No matter how you say 'wallpaper', be careful how you search.

SiteAdvisor users in Argentina and other Spanish speaking countries are now safer online.

SiteAdvisor’s Web site itself, including the reviewer area, has already been global for the last few weeks. Blog content and some of our press resources will remain in English, though, at least for now.

Like SiteAdvisor’s software, you’ll automatically see the SiteAdvisor Web site in your local language based on the settings in your computer’s operating system. (Again, keep in mind though that not all languages have been rolled out yet). But on the Web site, you can also manually set the language using the small drop down menu at the bottom right of each page of the site. We admit that it’s kind of fun to play around with this, actually.

“Web safety ratings” is one whopper of a 29 letter single word (Sicherheitsbewertungen) in German. Sort of adds figurative weight to what we’ve always believed is a very important issue.

We hope international users will benefit from our site reports which have also now been localized. One caveat though: we have not translated user comments into local languages; they will appear in only the language they were originally posted.

A site report page in Portuguese.

The user base of McAfee SiteAdvisor is growing in leaps and bounds around the world, and we’re very pleased to better support our international users with this first round of languages beyond English. Look for additional language support in the coming weeks and months.

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Misleading Work-At-Home Web Sites Better Left Unclicked

Ever wish you could work from home in your pajamas? Say goodbye to cubicles, commuter traffic, deadlines, and corporate politics? Well, according to numerous Web sites promoting home-based work opportunities, earning an extraordinary income from the comforts of your living room could be just a mouse-click away.

Unfortunately, these money-making propositions are often extremely deceptive. As the FTC warns, many work-at-home Web sites make exaggerated claims of potential earnings, provide misleading job descriptions and charge users for products or information before explaining what the work entails.

When we searched the Web for work-at-home opportunities, we found 65 sites with misleading offers. We've rated these sites yellow to warn users to be skeptical of advertising claims on these sites.

What They Say

Work-at-home scam sites lure consumers by promising rapid wealth, leisurely lifestyles, and relief from common job frustrations. These sites use emotional language about the hardships of financial distress and the toil of the daily office grind followed by aggressive claims about the income that can be expected from their opportunities or strategies. Type-at-Home.com claims that users can make $25-50 per hour with no experience necessary. MyDataJob.com claims that a mere 30 minutes of work per day can generate daily income in excess of $3000. Very enticing -- but also extremely exaggerated and unrealistic.

What They Mean

In sharp contrast to claims of guaranteed wealth, the fine print found in sites' "Earnings Disclaimers" explains that many people will not make money from these work-at-home opportunities. The disclaimer on ultimatewealthpackage.com notes that earnings claims presented on the site "should not be considered 'typical'" and "any testimonials and examples used are exceptional results, which do not apply to the average purchaser." There is no indication of what percentage of users has made the advertised "$1,000 to $30,000 per week in residual income" and what percentage has made absolutely nothing. Claims on these sites imply that everyone will easily make a fast fortune, but the probability of earning income may be extremely slim.

How To Lose Money

Rather than make users rich, these sites can actually add to users' financial problems. Scammy work-at-home opportunities typically require an initial monetary investment of $20-$100 for information, materials, program enrollment, or products. Many users may not even recoup their initial investments.

The $49.95 Pyramid

One common scam claims to offer extremely lucrative home data entry or typing opportunities. Dataentrybank.com claims that for a fee of $49.95, users will be able to earn over $1000 per day just by typing short ads. Their claims are misleading for many reasons.

Dataentrybank.com fails to provide a reasonable statement of tasks until users pay Dataentrybank.com's fee. Users have to pay the fee before they learn what the fee gets them – a design that's unsavory at best.

We're also concerned about the strategy Dataentrybank.com provides to users. Dataentrybank.com's materials show a troubling similarity to pyramid schemes. Dataentrybank.com provides instructions on how to become an affiliate for companies that pay referral commissions for driving online sales through sponsored ads. But Dataentrybank.com's tutorial simply shows how to become an affiliate of Dataentrybank.com itself. Having paid Dataentrybank.com its fee, what is an affiliate trained to do? Recruit others to Dataentrybank.com! But this kind of cycle is exactly a pyramid scheme. (See FTC definition: "Pyramid schemes … all share one overriding characteristic: … profits based primarily on recruiting others to join their program, not based on profits from any real investment or real sale of goods to the public.")

It's true that it's possible to become an affiliate of ecommerce sites and then potentially earn reasonable commissions. But becoming an affiliate just requires filling out a web application form. Applicants need not pay an intermediary like Dataentrybank.com $50 for the privilege. In fact, most of the information Dataentrybank.com charges for are accessible for free. The site's advertisement claims to set you up with a ClickBank account, which collects your earned commission. But all Dataentrybank.com does is provide a link to ClickBank.com's free account sign-up page -- which is itself an affiliate link whereby ClickBank pays Dataentrybank.com for each referral. The site also claims to give you "access" to a list of companies offering affiliate programs, but once again, it merely links to ClickBank's freely accessible directory. There are also many other free lists of affiliate programs available online (Refer-it.com's list includes well-known companies like Amazon and BestBuy, which are not found on ClickBank.com).

Dataentrybank.com's earnings claims are not true representations of the expected income of average users. They are anecdotal at best, perhaps representing the maximum amount an affiliate marketer once made in the past. Making money as an affiliate is time consuming, hard work that requires a strong understand of Internet marketing, pay per click advertising, and consumer psychology. It's hardly the cakewalk Dataentrybank.com suggests.

Paid Surveys: Our 2 Cents Worth

Another popular scheme involves charging users to participate in paid survey opportunities which, in fact, are accessible for free. For example, Surveyscout.com charges a $69.95 membership fee for a list of companies that offer paid surveys. But users do not need to enroll in a Surveyscout.com membership or pay any fees at all to sign up for these surveys. Anyone can make a request for consideration directly to the companies offering surveys. There are also many sites which provide lists of companies free of charge. Technicaljobsearch.com and freefromscams.com, for example, provide lengthy lists of market research companies that offer incentive-paid surveys. (These lists include such well-known companies as Nielsen NetRatings, Harris Interactive, and Ipsos. ) There is no need to pay for access to surveys, and users that do fork over the enrollment fee are no more assured of earning any money than those who don't.

Scammy survey sites also exaggerate how much money users can earn from these surveys. For each survey, survey companies screen users for target demographics, so users will only receive a survey invitation if they qualify. Compensation is therefore limited by the number of invitations a user receives. Most survey companies offer compensation in the form of sweepstakes or reward points that can be redeemed for merchandise. Cash rewards are often very small. (Common Knowledge Research Connections offers $1-5 per survey.). Therefore it is highly unlikely that anyone will earn thousands of dollars per month completing surveys – despite suggestions to the contrary as suggested on getpaidtosurveys.com.

We'll Tell You Later

Poor disclosure and lack of information are common themes amongst work-at-home sites. Consumers are therefore likely to end up making uninformed purchase decisions based purely on blind faith – hoping that the benefits of the a program will significantly outweigh the costs. Weeklycashincome.com charges $97 for its "Personal Instant Cash Machine System" which it claims can generate $1000 per day. But the Weeklycashincome.com site never describes how the system works and what the user will have to do in order to make money. Elevenf.com breaks the money-making process of its "Mobile Cash E-System" into the following steps: "Site down at your computer. Check your emails. Return your emails. Check your income accounts online to see how much you made. Do three to five simple transactions." Not exactly a thorough job description.

Better Off Selling Lemonade

It would certainly be great to find a work-at-home opportunity that generated substantial income with minimal effort, but such claims are generally too good to be true - otherwise we'd all be multi-millionaires. We're concerned by work-at-home Web sites that may mislead consumers with false promises of wealth, only to make quick profits themselves. Job hunters should not have to pay to get for work, and at the very least, they should be given full job descriptions prior to making any purchases. Job hunters should be given realistic earnings expectations and be made aware of any risks involved. In addition, much of the information that these sites charge for is available elsewhere for free. Users who pay to enroll in programs may never actually receive any income and therefore may never recoup the amount of their initial investment. By rating these sites yellow, we aim to warn users before they jump on an opportunity that might not deliver as promised.

Tips on avoiding work-at-home scams:

From the FTC
From Fraud.org

Click here to view our list of 65 misleading work-at-home sites.

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