If you’ve ever wondered why when you search for “scam” and “ripoff” along with a business opportunity or anyone in marketing, you find places like scam.com and ripoffreport.com at the top of the results, there’s actually a reason behind it.

I worked for a large corporation many years ago, and they did research which found that if you offered exceptional service to a customer they’d tell one person about it. If you screwed up something, they would tell 10 people about it. People love to complain and vent their feelings, so the “revenge” sites like ripoffreport.com and scam.com have become a big business. If you post a message there, it’s like a chain reaction and anyone who feels they’ve been done wrong by a place will chime in.

In search engine terms, this is a place that does a lot of updates (from the new complaints) and the threads of the message boards score high, so it’s almost a death sentence for many people and businesses. Even if you offer a business opportunity that’s legit, or you do business the right way, one bitter person who fails can get enough other people to score their page so high in the search engines you can’t recover.

Well, at ripoffreport.com you can, for a price. I spoke with one business owner and to get their negative comments removed it costs them $5,000 upfront and a $500 a month maintenance fee to keep negative posts off their site. Also Wikipedia has a lot of information on the place and current lawsuits and the companies who are paying this money, which some have connected with RICO and extortion. Actually my friend works at the Department of Justice and I’m going to ask him about this place tomorrow. Not even the authors of complaints can change their posts if a complaint is resolved.

Scams.com is a little nicer, they allow authors to edit and delete their posts, at the admins discretion (they can disable this at any time). They still don’t fare much better, they make their money by advertising, and they take all comers when it comes to get rich quick schemes advertised when you click on a category in their message boards. It’s full of “Make $150 an hour” or “Paid Survey” crap, so don’t get your hopes up with the advertisers there.

Of course it’s good to hear if something is a real scam, but you have to be able to filter out the people who tried things and failed due to the fact that any business (Internet or brick and mortar) is a risk and not everyone will make it. There’s a lot of places that prey on, and make their money from business opportunity seekers, but there’s also a lot of people who try things, risk it, and fail for other reasons. There’s no guarantee when starting a new business, and I speak with a lot of people who think it’s a job, and want to know the average income and how fast they’ll make the money. There is no average and nobody can tell you or guarantee anything, it’s a risk.

If you’re a newsletter junkie, or so new to an Internet business, this is the reason people fail about 5-6 times at this before finding a good one or giving up. It sounds depressing, but there are good ones out there, where you have people on your side. The real goal is finding a business opportunity where you have people hoping you’ll make it, who make thier money from your success, and not from bleeding you dry with advertising or training costs. If you want to know the best one that I do, visit my top pick page and I’ll tell you.