While visiting a public place or traveling by a public transport, white A4 size prints, pasted on walls with “Earn dollars by working from home through internet” written on them, can be seen. These advertisements are more common at places of higher youth concentration i.e. educational institutions. The purpose is to attract as many web savvy students towards these online business schemes. Those, who are drawn to this, finally end up wasting their time. Most of these ads are misleading and are based on false information.
Such businesses are linked with online advertisements. Different youth-oriented products and services are publicised online as this is an easy and cheap way of advertisement. These advertisements banners are placed on different websites which charge according to the viewing rate of these ads. These viewings are calculated through clicks on ad banners.
These websites hosting ad banners try to get as many visitors as possible. Keeping this in mind, emerged plenty of websites who play the role of a middleman and employ web surfers for clicking on these ad banners. These websites give a limited number of ads to their members for 24 hours. Each click on these ads generates a certain earning for the website and a smaller part of that earning is shared with the member clicking on the ad.
Such websites promise an earning of one cent on each click, which is cashed through a money transfer website when the earning reaches 20 to 25 dollars. The web surfers can employ other people as well by making them referrals. However, most of the time, these websites defraud their members when their profit is about to reach the specified limit.
Websites give a certain percent of each referral’s earning to the web surfer with whose reference the other person joined. The process consumes almost six to seven months after which the web surfer does not get anything in return except a lesson of not repeating this mistake again.
Punjab College of Commerce B.Com student, Ahsan Nazir, tells his story to Pakistan Today. “A friend of mine told me about this business and asked me to become his referral. I worked for five months on different ad-offering websites but it yielded nothing. I was working on 20 websites, out of which 17 defrauded me when the time of payment came,” he said. “I employed almost 30-35 referrals to each site and I got them by placing ads in different colleges, universities and internet cafes. When I left the business, I also advised all of them to leave it as well,” he said.
MS Sociology student, Sajad Khan, said that he also became a prey of these websites. He saw an advertisement in an internet café of Barkat Market and called on the contact number given in that ad. The person gave him his referral links of different websites, of which he became a member and started working. After one month, when he got nothing out of it and a friend told him that these were fake websites, he left it.
A Punjab University graduate and IT specialist, Ahsan Jamshed Khan, claimed to have received hefty earnings from the internet. He said that there were some original websites as well, who needed investments and gave profits as well.
Most of the internet users are students who can not invest but want to earn and are misled by these fraudulent websites, which disappear at the time of the payment. He confirmed that there were other techniques to earn through internet which include data entry and download hosting. “But these techniques require special skills and knowledge of IT, that is why these are not popular like those which are simpler but mostly fraudulent,” said Khan.
