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More news about Google money scams and work from home scams

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You may have seen advertisements, web sites, or emails saying that Google is hiring – paying people thousands of dollars to work from home. It’s not true, and the companies behind these ads are using Google’s name without permission.

We’ve been trying to get word out, and we’ve got a new post on the Official Google Blog about how the company is fighting fraud by taking “Google Money” scammers to court.

The story has really been taking off. Here’s a story from CBS News (I’m featured near the end):

Another story from a local NBC affiliate in Utah goes in to a little more detail on one of the companies named in the suit:

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

And here’s a story from KQED radio news – this is pretty exciting for me, since I listen to NPR on my way to and from work every day:

In general, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is. If you see an offer promising thousands of dollars for very little effort or investment, be skeptical.

MSNBC Article About Scams Promising Money From Google

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I did another interview a couple weeks ago about all the scams and get-rich-quick schemes using Google’s name and logo to fool people. Here’s the article at MSNBC, take a look.

Here’s a pretty good quote that sums up the scammers pretty well:

“They prey on people who are desperate,” says Ohio truck driver Robert Anderson, who fell for a home-based job opportunity that appeared to be from Google. “They make money by lying to people, promising them the world and giving them a guarantee they have no intention of honoring.”

I don’t have much more to add except that this sort of thing is showing up everywhere – email spam, spam accounts on Twitter, various ad networks, etc. Much of it is automated but the profit margins are high enough that they can afford to have actual people creating accounts, solving captchas, etc. so any company getting spammed with these schemes has to take a proactive approach.

As Shipwreck so presciently explained in 1985, the other half of the battle is knowing. Please feel free to send this article, or the one from ABC, or the Google Blog post around to any friends and family wondering about making money online. The truth is, may people make money with their websites, but it takes hard work. There’s no secret kit that returns cash with no effort and no investment.

Monopoly City Streets – Gaming on Google Maps

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I’m a bit of a map geek, and in my youth I spent many hours playing Sim City, so it’s no surprise I was excited to play Monopoly City Streets. The game is a heavily-modified version of the classic board game, played out across the map of the world. You compete with players from all over the planet to buy streets, build properties, and amass as much cash as possible.

monopoly city streets

The first thing I noticed was that the map display uses Google Maps, but the site actually uses OpenStreetMap data for gameplay. Actually, the first thing I noticed was that their servers were being absolutely crushed by all the people rushing in the play the game, but I digress. OpenStreetMap is a really cool project to build mapping data using the same model as Wikipedia – interested volunteers add and verify data and everything is covered by a Creative Commons License.

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