I know you know the basics on spotting writing scams and fortunately the scammers make it pretty easy to spot but I’ve seen two scams sucking in writers lately.

1- Creating email addresses and writing flirty emails.

A company will pay you to create Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo email addresses (they prefer Hotmail usually for some reason) and you write emails that are vague but pertaining to the fact the sender has seen the receiver’s profile (could be from a dating site or just a profile on yahoo, myspace blah, blah, blah) and they would LOVE to get to know them better.

There’s a link to click to contact the sender of the email and it leads to a dating site where the recipient of the email will have to sign up (read:pay a small fee) to write back.
Unfortunately, a huge segment of the population is just lonely enough that this technique works. They also give people copied Myspace and Yahoo profiles to copy for dating site profiles.

The money looks good for this. Most of the writers I have talked to were promised 400.00 or so a week for doing this. However upon turning in the email address list, profiles and other work – they are told their work is substandard and only a very tiny portion is actually “purchased”. I think you guessed the company actually uses everything.

These companies tend to disappear and reinvent themselves over and over. I know one writer that had the bad luck/insanity to actually work for one of these companies and then they disappeared and the same writer applied for the same type of job again on Craigslist and lo’ and behold it was the same company just new servers, emails and stuff.

2-You Need to Use *This* Software to Work With Us

This scam is pretty clever and no matter what – the scammer makes money. I actually read about this in a blackhat forum post.

This guy places ads on Craigslist seeking web content creators -he offers at the extreme high end for content – sometimes even higher than industry standards. This means a lot of writers will be answering.
He then asks for a sample article – pretty standard right? And then a few days later you will get a “Congratulations and Welcome Aboard” email that outlines their bogus company and their bogus reasons for needing web content. It looks good, I went trolling Craigslist until I found one of these places and I applied.

Then, you are sent your first assignment – woohoo it’s like $350 for 1000 words on XYZ topic. Hell yeah you want this gig. There’s ONE small hitch – the client wants to be able to speak directly to the writer via Skype or other web collab software program. This will cost the writer $7 and so since most of us writers are used to a little “out of pocket” that we later get reimbursed for – most writers will pay this.

The project falls through at the last minute, the scammer made $29 commission and you’re out a sample article and $7. The scammer will refund the $7 to the writer if asked but only if asked. He’s still up $21 bucks a writer even if he has to make a refund.

Those are two that I’ve seen on Craigslist – keep your eyes open and avoid the scams!