How To Avoid Foreclosure Rescue Rip Offs

The thought of one losing a home is terrifying. The fact that there are con artists out there who take advantage of homeowners is more or less frightening. There are many companies and individuals who claim they can help you keep your home or buy a home. Some are even brave to offer money-back guarantees.

For those threatened by foreclosure, they are vulnerable to foreclosure assistance companies who claim they can help them save their homes. Fraudulent foreclosure ‘rescue’ professionals tell their clients half truths and blatant lies to sell services that supposedly bring relief, but fail to deliver. Their goal is to make quick profit from fees or mortgage payments they collect from homeowners which, they do not pass on to lenders. There are times they assume ownership of these homes by deceiving the homeowners. By the time the homeowner realizes what is going on, it will be too late to save the home. They take the property, and some other times clean out the equity. This leads to home loss despite one’s best efforts.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is the United States of America’s consumer protection agency, has pointed out ways to recognize scams. Even if a homeowner facing foreclosure has started working with someone or a company. Or even the homeowner who is threatened by other bodies that can foreclose on your home like the IRS, Homeowners’ Associations, to name a few. There are legal options for people in these situations to save their homes.

THE SCAMS

Mortgage companies use different tactics to find homeowners in distress. Some of them go through public notices in newspapers and on the Internet or public files at local government offices. They send out letters to the homeowners. Some others take a broader approach by placing ads online, television, newspaper, posters on telephone poles, median strips, bus stops, or flyers or business cards at the door.

These scan artists use very simple and straight forward messages like these:

“Stop foreclosure now!”
“We guarantee to stop your foreclosure.”
“Keep your home. We know your home is scheduled to be sold. No problem!”
“We can save your home. Guaranteed. Free consultation.”
“We stop foreclosures every day. Our team of professionals can stop yours this week!”

The moment the homeowner’s attention is gotten, various tactics are used to get their money. Here are some of the ways:

Phony Counseling or Phantom Help

These scam artists tell homeowners that they can negotiate deals with the lenders to save their homes if a fee is paid first. Some will tell their clients not to contact their lenders, lawyers, credit counselors. They ask them to let them, the scam artists handle everything. Once the fee is paid, the scammer takes off with the money.

Other times, the scammer convinces the homeowner to make all mortgage payments to them while they negotiate with the lenders. The scam artists will collect some months’ payments and disappear.

Bait and Switch

There are times when homeowners think they are signing documents for a new loan to keep the existing mortgage current, not knowing they are being tricked. What they do not know is that they have signed documents that surrender the title of the house to the scammers in exchange for a ‘rescue’ loan.

Rent-to-Buy Scheme

Homeowners are asked to surrender the title of their homes as part of a deal that allows them to stay in their homes as renters, and buy back in a few years. They may also be told that surrendering the title will let borrowers with better credit rating to receive new financing, which will prevent the loss of their homes. Usually, the terms of these deals are too much that buying back these homes are impossible. The home is lost, and the scammer walks off with all or most of the equity. The worst of all, when the new borrower fails on the loan, the actual homeowner is evicted.

In some other ways, the scammer raises the rent over time to a point that the original homeowner is unable to make payments. After many payments are missed, the renter, who is the former homeowner, is evicted, leaving the ‘rescuer’ free to sell the house.

In other equity-skimming situations, the scammer offers to find a buyer for the house, only if the homeowner signs over the deed and moves out. The scammer may also promise to pay the homeowner a portion of the profit when the home is sold. The moment the deed is transferred, the scammer rents out the house and keeps the proceeds while the lender continues with the foreclosure. Eventually, the home is lost, and the homeowner is still responsible for the unpaid mortgage. Transferring the deed does not transfer the mortgage obligation.

Bankruptcy Foreclosure

The scammer may promise to negotiate with a homeowner’s lender or get refinancing on their behalf if a fee is paid immediately. Instead of contacting the lender or refinancing the loan, the scammer keeps the fee and files for bankruptcy in the homeowner’s name. Sometimes, this is done without their knowledge.

Very often, bankruptcy stops a foreclosure, but only temporarily. The bankruptcy step is complicated, not to talk of expensive and unforgiving. If one fails to attend the first meeting with creditors, the bankruptcy judge will dismiss the case and the foreclosure proceedings will continue.

When this happens, the person could lose the money paid to the scammer as well as the house. Worse of all, a bankruptcy stays on the person’s credit report for 10 years and can make it hard to obtain credit, buy a home, get life insurance, sometimes get a job.

Where Help Can Be Found

If you are finding it difficult to make your mortgage payment or if you have received a foreclosure notice, contact your lender immediately. You may be able to negotiate a new repayment schedule. Bear in mind that lenders normally do not want to foreclose; it costs them lots of money.

There are other foreclosure options that include reinstatement and forbearance.
You can also contact a credit counselor through the Homeownership Preservation Foundation (HPF). It is a non-profit organization that operates the national 24/7 toll-free hotline (1-888-995-HOPE) with free, bilingual, personalized assistance to help at-risk homeowners avoid foreclosure.

Here Are Some RED FLAGS

If you are looking for home loss prevention help, avoid businesses or people that:

1. Guarantee to stop foreclosure process, no matter what the circumstances are
2. Instruct you not to contact your lender, lawyer, or credit counselor
3. Collect fees before providing you with services
4. Accept payment only by cashier’s check or wire transfer
5. Encourage you to lease your home so you can buy it back over time
6. Tell you to make your mortgage payments directly to them, instead of to your lender
7. Tell you to transfer your house deed or title to them
8. Offer to buy your house for cash at a fixed price that is not set by the housing market at the time of sale
9. Offer to fill out paperwork for you
10. Pressures you to sign paperwork you have not had a chance to read thoroughly or that you do not understand.

Where to REPORT FRAUD

If you have been a victim of foreclosure fraud, contact:

• Federal Trade Commission
  
• Your state Attorney General
  
• Your local Better Business Bureau

Viral Ebook Explosion - Article 3

And the Buzz Goes On – How to Use Viral Marketing

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of how you can use viral marketing to help get a buzz concerning your small business, let's start with a definition of exactly what "viral marketing" means.


According to the Wikipedia, "Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages."


If you have a hotmail, yahoo or G-mail account, you participate in a viral marketing campaign every time you send an email to someone. The company you have account with inserts a small (and usually discreet advertisement) at the bottom of all of your outgoing emails – inviting the people you communicate with to receive their own free email account.


So how can you put a viral marketing campaign together for your own business. More importantly, do you even want to?


Let me answer that second question first, okay? YES! You definitely want to take the time to brainstorm your own viral marketing campaign – even if you don't want to be as big as hotmail, yahoo or Gmail.


Why? Because, according to a recent survey done by Forrester Research, people are almost 65% more likely to trust a review posted by a peer – or even a complete stranger – than they are to trust the marketing or sales information put out by the company.


Don't believe me? Check out Amazon.com and I-tunes. Why is this the case? Because as consumers we tend to think that the average "Joe Blow" has less of a personal agenda when posting his review about the latest "Dixie Chicks" album and so we give it more weight.


And, by the way, this is a normal reaction – it's one that's kind of hard-wired into all of us. People have always shared the things they like – or hate – with their friends and family members. Back in the 50's and 60's, our grandparents used to talk to their neighbors over the "back fence," call each other on the phone or tell their friends during lunch. The difference is, these days we use the Internet and cell phones.


What's interesting though, is that, with the popularity of the Internet, our trust - and belief in "social proof" – has become even stronger.


By creating your own viral marketing campaign, you'll be doing more than getting the word out about your new affiliate product. You'll be gathering social proof – and that will help your sales go through the roof.

So how do you set up your own viral marketing campaign? The first thing to do is to get back to the basics.


Here's the real "secret" to making a lot of money with affiliate products. Have the right product, with the right message to the right people at the right time.

So start with your affiliate product. Make sure there's a hungry audience for whatever you're selling.

Then make sure you're sending out the right message – and in the right way. If you're marketing a product to teens, you'll want to make sure that it's something they want – and you'll have to reach them where they hang out. That might be on MySpace, Facebook, twitter or even Friendster.

What's the right message? Maybe it's a special report. But it could just as easily be a video. Or an audio mp3 file. Match your message to your audience. And finally, make sure that you're getting your message out at the right time – when your audience is ready to buy it.

Make your viral marketing campaign stand out from the crowd – because that's how it's going to get passed around and become viral. By understanding the basics – who your audience is, what they want, how they want to get it and when they want it – all you have to do next is to create something that your audience loves – or hates – or finds interesting enough – to pass around to their friends. And because your product comes with an implied endorsement – social proof – those people will pass it around to other people – and the buzz goes on…and on…and on…and you'll start hearing the "ka-ching!" of your cash register going off a lot more often.

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Profiting with Private Label Rights

Private Label Rights (PLR) are used by some of the top internet entrepreneurs to quickly create products with very little investment of time or capital. Unfortunately, most internet entrepreneurs who have heard about PLR, make very little money with it. Instead of following a profitable plan, they run around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. Here’s why.

PLR products are completely customizable. Whether it’s an ebook, a piece of software, or a graphics package, you have complete control over the content. It’s the same as if I write an ebook for you and then give it to you and let you put your name on it and take all the credit for the content as if it’s yours. It’s fast, it’s simple and it’s completely legal.

So why doesn’t everyone do it? Because it takes some work, it’s a very minimal amount of work, but it is work. Most people are chasing get rich quick schemes so their impression of a successful PLR business is to buy lots of PLR products, stick them on a website and sell them to other people who do the same.

It doesn’t take very long until the market is saturated with the same PLR products on all the PLR websites. And then the average entrepreneur says, “PLR products don’t work.”

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs who have actually opened the zip file that the PLR product came in are making money hand over fist, because they took the time to customize the product and introduce it to the market as their own.

Here are some simple ideas:

1. Edit the ebook and add some of your own content. Add your own personal style and charm to the product. Then add your name as the author or publisher
2. Personalize the graphics or have a graphic designer do it for you
3. Edit the sales letter and again add your own style and character to it

When you’ve got the product complete, you could

1. Publish it at your website and send traffic to it. So you could sell it as a stand alone product
2. If you embed affiliate links into it, you could give it away as a freebie. When your reader’s click on your affiliate links, you get paid
3. You could use them as a tool for your affiliates and allow them to re-brand the product with their affiliate links to your products
4. You could turn the written ebook into an audio and sell it as an audio ebook which adds value to the package
5. You could strip the content down and turn it into articles
6. You could add some workbooks to it and market it as a course

Now just for comparison, let’s look at what it would cost to have your own ebook
written.

Costs $400 - $800 for a good 50 page ebook
Graphics for a website including affiliate marketing banners and images $200 - $500
Sales letter copy - $500 - $2,000+

In real costs, you’re looking at $1,100 - $3,300. That’s still good because you save a huge amount of time and all the heavy lifting is done for you. You don’t have to take care of all the intricate details of writing and designing. And that is just for a 50 page ebook. If you want a 100 page or even a 200 pager then just double or triple the writing costs. Or spend the next 3 - 6 months writing it yourself. But what if you could get PLR products all done and ready for you at a fraction of the several thousand dollars or hundreds of hours it would cost you to make yourself?

And coming from someone who’s been on both sides of the table, I’d much rather pay someone to take my ideas and topics and do most of the writing and editing so I can focus on the marketing and sales side.

So…if you want more, please visit SureFireWealth