Everybody wants to get a good bargain. As far as the general public is concerned, money for nothing is the best deal in town. Now don’t you go thinking it’s the neighbor living in the tiny one bedroom unit who wants things for free. Quite a number of celebrities and your multi millionaires go around snapping up all possible freebies they can. That’s one of the ways they stay rich after all.
Okay, so you probably go hunting for a good bargain site online as well. You might have stumbled on to a site that says they have the biggest music and video collection – over a million tracks. They will claim that you don’t need to pay anything; all items are free once you sign up. Hope your alarms are ringing at this point. When you try to check out the site, it keeps trying to get you to register, yet there are no free samples – not one. The scary part is they look absolutely legitimate.
These are almost definitely scam sites. They are very likely P2P sites, which turns you into a pirate (can you say RIAA?) and can get you sued. Second, it can be a site that tries to get your credit card details. Some sites will even have so called ratings from reputable sites such as cnet and CNN.
Before you give out any details, make sure to check out the site thoroughly. If you see the words P2P anywhere on their site, forget it. If they say that everything is free but ask you for a credit card or any other payment methods, dump the site!
Call their bluff. Visit the sites that they claim endorses them and look for the actual endorsement from these companies. You can rest assured that if they are for real, the article about them will be available and easily accessed at these sites.
Don’t be fooled. Take the time to investigate. Better yet, find a legal download source that is truly safe.