Worst Ways To Make Money

Lot of guys are looking for ways to make quick cash on the side. The problem is that almost every idea aside from "get another job that pays actual money" is fraught with risk and sleaziness.When they're not promising unrealistic fitness accomplishments, late-night infomercials are full of secretive (but guaranteed!) moneymaking ideas; and when spam e-mails take a break from promoting misspelled male enhancement products, it's only to let you know about some foolproof way to earn mad cash from the comfort of your own home. And then there are the ordinary everyday rumors -- you know the one about some coworker who has a cousin who totally makes 10 grand a week playing the market.

Some of this stuff is actually legitimate, but it comes bundled with an unnecessary and uncomfortable amount of risk; others are real opportunities that just happen to make almost no money at all. Some, finally, are flat-out scams founded on the knowledge that a bad economy produces desperate people, and desperate people make pretty good marks.Ask Men.CoM have compiled a list of the top 10 worst ways to make money so you can avoid them at all costs.

For every financial rock star who makes day trading look easy and glamorous, you’ll find eight or nine smart, capable guys who just can’t make it work.Every guy thinks that surely he’s one of the rock stars, but statistically, once you factor in everyone who loses big, day traders actually earn a lower return than the average investing household. So in the end, it’s essentially a stressful, complicated and high-pressure way to make less money than if you just handed your cash to people who know what they’re doing and then went to take a nap.

If you’ve ever seen infomercials for some sort of vague but astonishing moneymaking opportunity usually one whose details you’ll learn after forking over a few hundred bucks for a seminar there’s a good chance it involved flipping real estate. And hey, the guy giving the seminar just got everyone in the room to empty their wallets, so his get-rich-quick scheme worked for one person, anyway.Flipping is a lot less common as housing prices continue to drop, but even when prices do hit rock bottom, any property you buy is still money that’s gone until you get someone else to pay you for the damn thing.

The foreign exchange market is risky enough to begin with, given that it’s a zero-sum game in which you’re only going to benefit if someone else loses money, and you’re working against people who do this for a living and have more capital than you. In the end, probably only about 15% of forex traders are profitable.On top of that, forex fraud is more popular than ever; there’s no magic software that will guarantee you forex trading profits, and forex trading is not low-risk. However, there are plenty of people who will promise you these and other ridiculous things just so they can walk away with your money.

A common subject of Google sidebar ads and exclamation-filled spam e-mails; filling out online surveys is touted as a simple task that is for some reason worth $10, $20, maybe even $50 an hour -- whatever nonsense price they quote is never even close to the truth. How much do you really expect to get for an anonymous busywork job that requires absolutely no talent or ability?
If you said anything higher than 40 cents an hour, you're out of your mind. And that's assuming you find one of the legitimate opportunities; the others are likely to charge you some fee for the privilege and then never pay you anyway.

A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is essentially just a Ponzi scheme, a principle with which everyone and his grandma is familiar with by now -- investors are promised an absurdly high return, and initially they get it (or rather, they get the money of the new investors who were promised the same thing). The scheme is completely unsustainable after a few levels, which is why the people who implement them rely on early investors to spread news of their success.
HYIPs are thoroughly illegal, and the simple rule of thumb is that any promised high return that seems too good to be true almost certainly is.

Online video games are on track to become a $10 billion industry in 2010. If playing video games all day is your thing, it might seem like an attractive prospect to try to sell in-game stuff for real-world money (a World of Warcraft character famously sold for nearly $10,000 back in 2007). The problem with trying to be competitive in online "gold farming" is that you'll be competing with 400,000 guys, typically Korean or Chinese, making $100 a month and working 12-hour days, so it's inadvisable unless you want to turn the game into a soul-numbing, 30-cents-an-hour ordeal.

OK, so some blogs actually do make money from advertising. The problem is that the vast majority of these profitable blogs are professional in nature, so when Engadget or the Huffington Post makes money, it's because these sites are actually breaking news or getting industry superstars to write columns. Unless you can snag a former Secretary of State to contribute to your musings about Batman, it's unlikely that you'll similarly distinguish yourself.Instead, like most personal blogs, you can maybe expect to make enough to cover the cost of hosting -- and only after you put in two years of building your audience.

Paid medical testing is neither a scam nor a low-reward opportunity; it's possible to make actual money if you devote yourself to being a full-time pincushion for science. No, this idea comes with its own unique set of drawbacks like vomiting, chills, seizure, death stuff like that.Six subjects in London, for example, suffered organ damage and life-threatening complications while testing an arthritis treatment in 2006. The real question isn't whether or not you can make money this way; it's how much bodily harm you're willing to risk in the process.

There are two problems with gambling in order to make money: The first is the concept of "gambler's ruin," which states that anybody with a finite bankroll (i.e., you) will eventually lose everything when playing against an opponent with an infinite bankroll (i.e., The House). The second problem is that the typical male compulsive gambler loses over $50,000 a year and is 20 times more likely than the average non-gambler to commit suicide. Taken together, these points should indicate that gambling as a moneymaking measure is roughly equivalent to throwing your money directly in the garbage.

The famed "419 scam" is a type of advance fee fraud whereby a polite Nigerian widow, preacher, political prisoner, or regular old fellow (who happens to be a millionaire) e-mails you, out of the blue, to help protect his fortune. All he needs is some cash to pay a fee, expense, or bribe, and a portion of his riches are yours.If you thought this old-as-the-internet scam had grown out of style well, it hasn't; the 419 scam netted $4.3 billion in 2007 alone and somewhere around $32 billion overall, making it the single most massive scam in history.