How to Identify Laptop Scams?
If you pay attention and use a bit of common sense it is not hard to identify Laptop scams. Here are few points to look for when you receive a free Laptop offer.
1. Who provides the offer?
If the offer is from a reputed company then there is a chance that it is a genuine free Laptop promotion like these and not a scam. However, most of the free promotions are managed by marketing companies on behalf of the offer provider. Therefore you may not find the offer provider straight away.
Read the terms and conditions and disclaimer of the offer and you will find the offer provider.
2. What you need to do to receive the Laptop?
You need to do certain tasks to receive a free Laptop. Usually they will ask you to fill a survey, provide testimonials or product reviews etc.
Some Laptop scammers will ask you to purchase certain items online by using a credit card. You must be very careful here, especially if the offer provider is not a reputed merchant. Submitting your credit card details to unknown merchants and websites is very risky.
3. Look for reviews from others.
When you want to jump in to a free Laptop offer use the Internet to read reviews from others about the same offer. If it is a scam there is a big chance that someone else must have posted comments on the Internet about it. Search in consumer forums and scams related forums.
4. Read terms and conditions carefully
If you read terms and conditions you will come to know whether the offer is genuine or a free Laptop scam. Merchants offer free Laptops as marketing bait. This is normal. They will try to promote their products or the brand name through the promotion. However, the scammers don’t have anything to promote but get your email address or credit card details.
If you read terms and conditions you will realize whether the merchant is trying to promote a product, service or their brand name or a scammer who has nothing to promote.
Handy Tip
Usually free Laptop offers will ask you to enter your email address. This is the very first thing they will ask you to do. I have a free Gmail account that I use only for offers like these. I do not use my normal email address. In this way in the worse case I will be loosing only this email address as I always can close the email account any time.
