Google was used in a bogus work scheme
Blaggers must surrender $3.5 million
By Spencer Dalziel
Tue Oct 19 2010, 11:57
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1790829/google-bogus-scheme
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/flame_author/1790829/google-bogus-scheme
DODGY SCAMMERS have been busted by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for unsubstantiated links to Google and hidden fees rackets.
The nefarious ne'er-do-well operators set up dodgy work-at-home schemes, splattering Google's logo and name all over their literature. The racketeers then embedded automatic hidden charges into their work-at-home kits and took the $72.21 from their victims' bank accounts every month. The scam was set up so that the cash would continue to come out until the punters cancelled the automatic charges at the bank. Failure to cancel the charges was taken as a nod by the fraudsters to continue collecting their illicit fees.
Promising $100,000 in six months, the blaggers called their work-at-home kits "Google Money Tree", "Google Treasure Chest" and "Google Pro". The defrauded customers weren't told by the defendants that they would incur any hidden charges for signing up with the services. Punters were lured into signing up by the bad economic climate.
According to the FTC, the defendants will have to surrender $3.5 million in assets for falsely claiming they were linked with Google. The assets include a big Harley motorcycle and a gun collection. They were also done for dodging the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, which is in place to stop third parties from dipping into bank accounts without written permission.
The INQURIER reported in December last year that Google was dragged into another work from home scam. In that case Google sued a company called Pacific Webworks for having allegedly been involved in exactly the same type of scheme.
MY THOUGHTS
the internet world is full of crooks. careful.careful
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
crowdsourcing for work at home entrepreneur
Crowdsourcing work: Labour on demand or digital sweatshop?By Fiona Graham
Business reporter, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11600902
There are not many chief executives who can boast a workforce of half a million people around the globe. But then Lukas Biewald's workforce is not your traditional one. As boss of San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, he says that his company offers "labour on demand". His employees are crowdsourced - people who work from home, when needed, on specific projects.
"It doesn't make sense to build a box around people, put in internet and plumbing and everything else, make them drive to work and have managers for them," Mr Biewald says. "I think that companies like ours are really set to disrupt the whole outsourcing industry."
The rapid spread of broadband internet has allowed an explosion in companies offering a virtual workforce. They provide people ready to complete jobs ranging from small data-driven tasks, to design, translation and content production - in fact anything really that can be done on a laptop with an internet connection at home.
Human intelligence
For companies using these services, the main benefits are cost and speed. Workers are not employees, and are paid either an hourly or piece rate. In some cases work is done on spec, with only the "winner" pocketing the reward. And rates tend to be lower than would be paid to conventional freelancers.
So not surprisingly, the trend has attracted controversy, with some commentators comparing it to off-shore digital sweatshops. The granddaddy of them all is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Its original purpose was to find duplicate web pages for Amazon products - a simple task, but one that computers were unable to do. The company quickly saw that there was a wider application and the service went public in 2005. It lists thousands of "human intelligence tasks", or HITs, from comparing different web pages, to transcription and tagging photos. The jobs pay anything from a few cents up to a few dollars for more complicated work.
And it did not take long for the idea to be adopted elsewhere. You can crowdsource web development from oDesk, find a writer to create your content from Elance, and source your logo for a few hundred dollars from Crowdspring or 99designs.
To fund your project there is Kickstarter, and if your customers get cranky you can send them to Get Satisfaction. When you are ready to move on to higher level research and development, you can put it out to the crowd at InnoCentive.
Virtual money
CrowdFlower compares its labour-on-demand model with cloud computing - when you divide a task between a group of computers it is accomplished more quickly, around the clock, thanks to greater processing power. The company's workforce is available immediately, according to Mr Biewald.
"For example, you might have a directory of a million businesses and the job is to check that all the addresses are correct," he says.
"We have people instantly around the world waiting for work to come through."
“When we started we weren't really sure if companies would buy it.”
Lukas Biewald
CEO, CrowdFlower
What makes CrowdFlower slightly different is that they do not source their workers directly from the internet. Jobs are taken in, and then the company uses a diverse range of channels to fill the task. They work with initiatives allowing, for example, single mothers to work from home. Traditionally games companies have offered players in applications such as Farmville the chance to take part in surveys, or watch adverts to earn in-game currency. Now they have the chance to complete CrowdFlower tasks, through a system called Virtual Pay.
"I love it because we almost trick the game players into doing something useful for the world while playing these games.
"Just do ten minutes of real work that a real company can use, and we'll give you a virtual tractor. That way everyone wins."
'High quality'
A large part of CrowdFlower's effort goes into quality control. Mr Biewald estimates that about 99% of their research and development is focused on how to keep quality high. They do this through a complex statistical analysis system where they track the accuracy of workers. As people progress up the food chain, they receive bonuses. "The end result is that customers actually get higher quality data than they would have got through normal outsourcing," Mr Biewald says.
Clients past and present include Microsoft, PayPal, eBay and the US Department of State.
"When we started we weren't really sure if companies would buy it, but what we've seen is a lot of big companies are interested in this new model,. In fact they're not just interested but they desperately want labour on demand."
Design for life
Operating from Australia and the US, 99designs launched in 2008 and crowdsources logos from a community of about 100,000 amateur and professional designers. It uses a competition-style business model. The company that is looking for a logo offers a prize (the minimum is $200) and writes a brief. Designers then submit logo designs, the customer reviews them and may ask for revisions, before then picking a winner. Copyright then passes to the customer and the winning designer is paid the prize money. The company charges a $39 listing fee, plus 15% of the prize fund.
The company grew from the forums of Sitepoint.com and according to founder Mark Harbottle, designers on the forums had started competing against each other in contests. This then grew as entrepreneurs started offering cash for logo designs for their own companies. "The designers loved it because it was what they were already doing, but they could get paid for it. We noticed it was happening and kind of latched onto the idea, and built software solution to help these designers doing what they were doing anyway."
The company estimates that a new design is uploaded to the site every five seconds. It pays out close to $700,000 a month to designers, and expects this to top $1m by the end of the year. But can a crowdsourced design really compare to going to a traditional design agency? Mr Harbottle does not think there's a comparison. "Would you get a better result from an agency? Probably but I think that what we do is that we serve that bottom part of the market. "We're servicing the mom and pop shops, the small business, the freelancers and what these guys want is just an image to put on their business card or their website."
Brave new world?
As companies such as 99designs and their main competitor CrowdSpring flourish, the backlash has also grown. Websites including Nospec.com and Specwatch have accused companies of exploiting designers and devaluing the profession.
They say designers are producing work on a regular basis with no guarantee of payment, and claim that the payment on offer is far below market rate. Specwatch, an anonymous collective, monitors design competitions, flagging up contests where, they claim, no award was made, and instances where the winning design was plagiarised. Mr Harbottle says that the community does effectively self-police, but that the company is doing what it can to stamp out intellectual property theft. "If it was really bad we'd probably just ban them instantly. The thing that's important is to keep on top of the community to stamp out that behaviour, it's not acceptable, it's actually illegal."
The controversy goes beyond the design community. When professional networking site LinkedIn started suggesting that people listed as translators might like to help with a crowdsourced project to translate sections of the site "because it's fun", the fallout from incensed professionals resulted in the setting up of a LinkedIn group protesting the move.
Education and experience is vital to ensure strategic design work, which also requires collaboration between client and agency, says Debbie Millman, president of the US association for professional designers, the AIGA, which has around 20,000 members.
“You wouldn't go into a restaurant and ask for five different meals and only pay for the one you like. Why should it be ok to work with designers that way?”
Debbie Millman
President, AIGA
"Once you take that partnership away then what you're really asking for is work that is unstrategic, that is created in a silo of not having any real education about what the client is looking for, and not being able to collaborate on ideas or inspiration", says Ms Millman, who is also president of design company Sterling. "I feel that when you crowdsource work, it's really not about collaboration of large groups, it's really about power, because you're taking away all the power of the designer to be compensated for their work, for their skill, and I don't see in anyway how that's collaborative. I think it's abusive."
Pro-spec commentators argue that the work benefits designers, by helping them build portfolios but Ms Millman is scathing about this. "If somebody is looking to build their portfolio, perhaps they could offer their services pro-bono to an organisation that's really going to be able to help them. It's an imbalance of power. "You wouldn't go into a restaurant and ask for five different meals and only pay for the one you like. Why should it be okay to work with designers that way?".
Offshoring the crowd
Given that crowdsourcing sites draw large amounts of workers from the developing world, critics see this as a new model for off-shoring jobs from developed countries. "I think the criticisms are not crazy. It's something that we think about a lot," says CrowdFlower's Lukas Biewald. "But I'd say most of what we see is not taking away jobs from people. It's actually getting extra work done that our customers wouldn't have been able to do otherwise." The company has a partnership with a company called Samasource, providing work for people in Kenyan refugee camps, where the $2-an-hour rate of pay is far above what the workers could otherwise earn.
Mr Biewald believes the developing world has a right to benefit from new working opportunities. "I don't see why someone in China should only be allowed to do the worst, most dangerous jobs we have to offer. "The great thing about digital work is it's really hard to make a sweatshop out of digital work. It's really hard to force someone to do work, you can't beat someone up through a computer screen."
MY THOUGHTS
need to research more on this one. sounds very interesting
Business reporter, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11600902
There are not many chief executives who can boast a workforce of half a million people around the globe. But then Lukas Biewald's workforce is not your traditional one. As boss of San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, he says that his company offers "labour on demand". His employees are crowdsourced - people who work from home, when needed, on specific projects.
"It doesn't make sense to build a box around people, put in internet and plumbing and everything else, make them drive to work and have managers for them," Mr Biewald says. "I think that companies like ours are really set to disrupt the whole outsourcing industry."
The rapid spread of broadband internet has allowed an explosion in companies offering a virtual workforce. They provide people ready to complete jobs ranging from small data-driven tasks, to design, translation and content production - in fact anything really that can be done on a laptop with an internet connection at home.
Human intelligence
For companies using these services, the main benefits are cost and speed. Workers are not employees, and are paid either an hourly or piece rate. In some cases work is done on spec, with only the "winner" pocketing the reward. And rates tend to be lower than would be paid to conventional freelancers.
So not surprisingly, the trend has attracted controversy, with some commentators comparing it to off-shore digital sweatshops. The granddaddy of them all is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Its original purpose was to find duplicate web pages for Amazon products - a simple task, but one that computers were unable to do. The company quickly saw that there was a wider application and the service went public in 2005. It lists thousands of "human intelligence tasks", or HITs, from comparing different web pages, to transcription and tagging photos. The jobs pay anything from a few cents up to a few dollars for more complicated work.
And it did not take long for the idea to be adopted elsewhere. You can crowdsource web development from oDesk, find a writer to create your content from Elance, and source your logo for a few hundred dollars from Crowdspring or 99designs.
To fund your project there is Kickstarter, and if your customers get cranky you can send them to Get Satisfaction. When you are ready to move on to higher level research and development, you can put it out to the crowd at InnoCentive.
Virtual money
CrowdFlower compares its labour-on-demand model with cloud computing - when you divide a task between a group of computers it is accomplished more quickly, around the clock, thanks to greater processing power. The company's workforce is available immediately, according to Mr Biewald.
"For example, you might have a directory of a million businesses and the job is to check that all the addresses are correct," he says.
"We have people instantly around the world waiting for work to come through."
“When we started we weren't really sure if companies would buy it.”
Lukas Biewald
CEO, CrowdFlower
What makes CrowdFlower slightly different is that they do not source their workers directly from the internet. Jobs are taken in, and then the company uses a diverse range of channels to fill the task. They work with initiatives allowing, for example, single mothers to work from home. Traditionally games companies have offered players in applications such as Farmville the chance to take part in surveys, or watch adverts to earn in-game currency. Now they have the chance to complete CrowdFlower tasks, through a system called Virtual Pay.
"I love it because we almost trick the game players into doing something useful for the world while playing these games.
"Just do ten minutes of real work that a real company can use, and we'll give you a virtual tractor. That way everyone wins."
'High quality'
A large part of CrowdFlower's effort goes into quality control. Mr Biewald estimates that about 99% of their research and development is focused on how to keep quality high. They do this through a complex statistical analysis system where they track the accuracy of workers. As people progress up the food chain, they receive bonuses. "The end result is that customers actually get higher quality data than they would have got through normal outsourcing," Mr Biewald says.
Clients past and present include Microsoft, PayPal, eBay and the US Department of State.
"When we started we weren't really sure if companies would buy it, but what we've seen is a lot of big companies are interested in this new model,. In fact they're not just interested but they desperately want labour on demand."
Design for life
Operating from Australia and the US, 99designs launched in 2008 and crowdsources logos from a community of about 100,000 amateur and professional designers. It uses a competition-style business model. The company that is looking for a logo offers a prize (the minimum is $200) and writes a brief. Designers then submit logo designs, the customer reviews them and may ask for revisions, before then picking a winner. Copyright then passes to the customer and the winning designer is paid the prize money. The company charges a $39 listing fee, plus 15% of the prize fund.
The company grew from the forums of Sitepoint.com and according to founder Mark Harbottle, designers on the forums had started competing against each other in contests. This then grew as entrepreneurs started offering cash for logo designs for their own companies. "The designers loved it because it was what they were already doing, but they could get paid for it. We noticed it was happening and kind of latched onto the idea, and built software solution to help these designers doing what they were doing anyway."
The company estimates that a new design is uploaded to the site every five seconds. It pays out close to $700,000 a month to designers, and expects this to top $1m by the end of the year. But can a crowdsourced design really compare to going to a traditional design agency? Mr Harbottle does not think there's a comparison. "Would you get a better result from an agency? Probably but I think that what we do is that we serve that bottom part of the market. "We're servicing the mom and pop shops, the small business, the freelancers and what these guys want is just an image to put on their business card or their website."
Brave new world?
As companies such as 99designs and their main competitor CrowdSpring flourish, the backlash has also grown. Websites including Nospec.com and Specwatch have accused companies of exploiting designers and devaluing the profession.
They say designers are producing work on a regular basis with no guarantee of payment, and claim that the payment on offer is far below market rate. Specwatch, an anonymous collective, monitors design competitions, flagging up contests where, they claim, no award was made, and instances where the winning design was plagiarised. Mr Harbottle says that the community does effectively self-police, but that the company is doing what it can to stamp out intellectual property theft. "If it was really bad we'd probably just ban them instantly. The thing that's important is to keep on top of the community to stamp out that behaviour, it's not acceptable, it's actually illegal."
The controversy goes beyond the design community. When professional networking site LinkedIn started suggesting that people listed as translators might like to help with a crowdsourced project to translate sections of the site "because it's fun", the fallout from incensed professionals resulted in the setting up of a LinkedIn group protesting the move.
Education and experience is vital to ensure strategic design work, which also requires collaboration between client and agency, says Debbie Millman, president of the US association for professional designers, the AIGA, which has around 20,000 members.
“You wouldn't go into a restaurant and ask for five different meals and only pay for the one you like. Why should it be ok to work with designers that way?”
Debbie Millman
President, AIGA
"Once you take that partnership away then what you're really asking for is work that is unstrategic, that is created in a silo of not having any real education about what the client is looking for, and not being able to collaborate on ideas or inspiration", says Ms Millman, who is also president of design company Sterling. "I feel that when you crowdsource work, it's really not about collaboration of large groups, it's really about power, because you're taking away all the power of the designer to be compensated for their work, for their skill, and I don't see in anyway how that's collaborative. I think it's abusive."
Pro-spec commentators argue that the work benefits designers, by helping them build portfolios but Ms Millman is scathing about this. "If somebody is looking to build their portfolio, perhaps they could offer their services pro-bono to an organisation that's really going to be able to help them. It's an imbalance of power. "You wouldn't go into a restaurant and ask for five different meals and only pay for the one you like. Why should it be okay to work with designers that way?".
Offshoring the crowd
Given that crowdsourcing sites draw large amounts of workers from the developing world, critics see this as a new model for off-shoring jobs from developed countries. "I think the criticisms are not crazy. It's something that we think about a lot," says CrowdFlower's Lukas Biewald. "But I'd say most of what we see is not taking away jobs from people. It's actually getting extra work done that our customers wouldn't have been able to do otherwise." The company has a partnership with a company called Samasource, providing work for people in Kenyan refugee camps, where the $2-an-hour rate of pay is far above what the workers could otherwise earn.
Mr Biewald believes the developing world has a right to benefit from new working opportunities. "I don't see why someone in China should only be allowed to do the worst, most dangerous jobs we have to offer. "The great thing about digital work is it's really hard to make a sweatshop out of digital work. It's really hard to force someone to do work, you can't beat someone up through a computer screen."
MY THOUGHTS
need to research more on this one. sounds very interesting
Friday, October 29, 2010
Make a Home Office Feel Like a Real Office with Peerdrum
Make a Home Office Feel Like a Real Office with Peerdrum
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 10.22.10
Science & Technology (electronics)
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/10/make-a-home-office-feel-like-real-office.php
There is a lot to love about having people work from home. Notwithstanding some recent naysaying, it saves a lot of energy and time, and other studies show that it increases productivity. But about half of the managers in America hate the idea, because their idea of managing is watching their drones and checking their comings and goings. Their prayers are answered, thanks to Peerdrum, a new program that lets your boss metaphorically look over your shoulders while you work at home. Now you can have that same lack of privacy and empowerment at home that you remember from the good old days.
This ingenious great leap forward takes a snapshot of your screen every ten minutes and sends it to your boss, who then knows exactly what you are doing and watching. Want some privacy to do your own thing? Don't worry, you can "check out" and not send the shots to the boss. This has the added benefit that you can do what you want without worrying about taking advantage of your benevolent employer, because you won't get paid for the time you check out.
The developers put it this way in an email:
We contract remote workers exclusively and needed a better way to remotely manage their time and performance. It lets you monitor remote workers via automated screenshots and time tracking. You can see what your team is doing throughout the day so you don't need to be literally standing over their shoulders. No one likes feeling spied on, so we try to keep the power in the team's hands by allowing them to pause the monitoring whenever they want a break, which also pauses their time tracking so billing is more accurate and honest.
That is the thing I so miss from the office- that happy interaction with the boss as he stood over my shoulders and clocked my comings and goings. I just can't wait until they implement this at TreeHugger, it will be just like the old days back at the cube farm!
MY THOUGHTS
i hope this country will catch up soon enough. there are so many tasks that can be done from home. think of how much money can be saved on office space and electricity. and on personal transpo expense. i know it will work. purely performance-based. this time tracking is a very good solution.
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 10.22.10
Science & Technology (electronics)
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/10/make-a-home-office-feel-like-real-office.php
There is a lot to love about having people work from home. Notwithstanding some recent naysaying, it saves a lot of energy and time, and other studies show that it increases productivity. But about half of the managers in America hate the idea, because their idea of managing is watching their drones and checking their comings and goings. Their prayers are answered, thanks to Peerdrum, a new program that lets your boss metaphorically look over your shoulders while you work at home. Now you can have that same lack of privacy and empowerment at home that you remember from the good old days.
This ingenious great leap forward takes a snapshot of your screen every ten minutes and sends it to your boss, who then knows exactly what you are doing and watching. Want some privacy to do your own thing? Don't worry, you can "check out" and not send the shots to the boss. This has the added benefit that you can do what you want without worrying about taking advantage of your benevolent employer, because you won't get paid for the time you check out.
The developers put it this way in an email:
We contract remote workers exclusively and needed a better way to remotely manage their time and performance. It lets you monitor remote workers via automated screenshots and time tracking. You can see what your team is doing throughout the day so you don't need to be literally standing over their shoulders. No one likes feeling spied on, so we try to keep the power in the team's hands by allowing them to pause the monitoring whenever they want a break, which also pauses their time tracking so billing is more accurate and honest.
That is the thing I so miss from the office- that happy interaction with the boss as he stood over my shoulders and clocked my comings and goings. I just can't wait until they implement this at TreeHugger, it will be just like the old days back at the cube farm!
MY THOUGHTS
i hope this country will catch up soon enough. there are so many tasks that can be done from home. think of how much money can be saved on office space and electricity. and on personal transpo expense. i know it will work. purely performance-based. this time tracking is a very good solution.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
FBI warning on work-from-home schemes
FBI warning targets work-from-home schemes
http://www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=13372054
SOUTH CAROLINA (WMBF)- The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a consumer warning Wednesday, as thousands of consumers continue to lose money from work-from-home scams. Officials claim scam victims are often recruited by organized cybercriminals through a variety of outlets, ranging from newspaper ads to online employment services and unsolicited emails. Once a person is recruited for the job, officials say often times the consumer becomes a "mule" for cyber criminals to steal and launder money.
Now, federal officials are warning consumers to be on the lookout for these types of scams and to take precautions to avoid becoming a victim. Those looking for work are asked to be wary of work-from-home opportunities and to research a company before signing on for work.
Other tips from the FBI to avoid work-from-home scams include:
•Be cautious about any opportunities offering the chance to work from home with very little work or prior experience. Remember: if it looks too good to be true, it usually is.
•Never pay for the privilege of working for an employer. Be suspicious of opportunities that require you to pay for things up front, such as supplies and other materials.
•Never give your bank account details to anyone unless you know and trust them. A February 2010 crackdown coordinated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has continued to target these types of schemes, many of which have been fueled by a slowing economy.
Those who believe they have become a victim of a work-from-home scam should contact their financial institution immediately. Any fraudulent activity or suspicious work-from-home offers should be reported to the Internet Crime Center.
MY THOUGHTS
better safe than sorry. remember - never pay. there are home-based jobs for sure. but we shouldn't be required to pay of it's legit.
http://www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=13372054
SOUTH CAROLINA (WMBF)- The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a consumer warning Wednesday, as thousands of consumers continue to lose money from work-from-home scams. Officials claim scam victims are often recruited by organized cybercriminals through a variety of outlets, ranging from newspaper ads to online employment services and unsolicited emails. Once a person is recruited for the job, officials say often times the consumer becomes a "mule" for cyber criminals to steal and launder money.
Now, federal officials are warning consumers to be on the lookout for these types of scams and to take precautions to avoid becoming a victim. Those looking for work are asked to be wary of work-from-home opportunities and to research a company before signing on for work.
Other tips from the FBI to avoid work-from-home scams include:
•Be cautious about any opportunities offering the chance to work from home with very little work or prior experience. Remember: if it looks too good to be true, it usually is.
•Never pay for the privilege of working for an employer. Be suspicious of opportunities that require you to pay for things up front, such as supplies and other materials.
•Never give your bank account details to anyone unless you know and trust them. A February 2010 crackdown coordinated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has continued to target these types of schemes, many of which have been fueled by a slowing economy.
Those who believe they have become a victim of a work-from-home scam should contact their financial institution immediately. Any fraudulent activity or suspicious work-from-home offers should be reported to the Internet Crime Center.
MY THOUGHTS
better safe than sorry. remember - never pay. there are home-based jobs for sure. but we shouldn't be required to pay of it's legit.
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