I am so in a gay rage right now!

First things first. How much would you pay someone to design an online store where you can sell name brand merchandise, never have to ship or receive anything yourself, never have to handle billing or purchasing, but basically just sit back and watch the "unlimited income" flooding in?

Hmmm… You seem skeptical.

Now, what if I told your website would be professionally designed to look like this, using the latest in design technology:



Interesting! You seem more skeptical than before. Let's continue.

And finally, what if the person cold-called you some random weeknight offering you all this for a "small" one-time investment. On your credit card. And he needs your 3-digit security code from the back of your card to process the payment. Oh, and your social security number for the W9 form. And just a few other personal bits of information to verify your identity.

If you're not yelling, "It's a scam! He's trying to steal your money and identity! Hang up…HANG UP!!!" at your computer display, you're probably my dear, sweet, innocent, naive mother.

Bless my mom's heart, she thought she was making a sound business decision to aide in her retirement years. But she's barely only been online for two years now — and only email at that — so how was she to know scams like this exist or that she could be taken to the cleaners. She only watches Christian satellite broadcasts, so she's not seen the countless Dateline and 20/20 and nightly news stories about identity theft and internet scams out there. Plus, looking back over my whole life, she's always been trying out the "get rich quick" and "earn unlimited income without lifting a finger" schemes that have come along over the years. She's an enteral optimist, where as I, having watched all this happen over the years, am very much not an optimist.

It wasn't until Tuesday night that I learned about my mom's new venture. I was driving when she told me so I couldn't exactly look at it right then or the rest of the conversation would have been decidedly different. And by the time I got home after 11 non-stop hours at the office, all I could do was nuke up some corn dogs and fall asleep while eating them. After years of watching her get rich quick efforts come and go with little collateral damage, I wasn't as worried as I should have been. It wasn't until Wednesday night that I remembered what we'd talked about an I logged on to check out her business venture. The moment the page started loading banner ad upon banner ad my heart sank and I wanted to vomit. Someone had suckered her into thinking pages of banner ads was an "online storefront" and she didn't know any different; she's never bought anything online before. Heck, I don't think she's even googled once!

Adding insult to injury, not only was she scammed into thinking she was joining the exciting world of online shopping and about to make an endless amount of money, but the website looks like shit! Professionally designed my ass, the little link in the bottom of the page pointing back to an online website creating tool proves that it couldn't have been. I've seen better design MySpace pages, and that's saying something. Adding to the nausea was a growing sense of panic and anger…I was feeling the onset of a gay rage. I spent the next 4 hours into the early morning researching as much about the perpetrators of the scam as possible and figuring out how to tell my mom without her thinking I was just dumping on her good idea or making her feel like a fool.

On Friday morning I'd gather as much information as I could and just decided I'd just ask her questions that would lead her to figure out she made a mistake and then help guide her on what to do next for damage control. I had no idea that how bad it really was.

I'm getting all worked up into a rage again so I'll post the rest of this when I've calmed down enough to type without breaking the keyboard and grinding my teeth. Stay tuned…