The Internet is littered with ads for “get rich quick” schemes and it’s easy to get sucked into wasting time reading about automated systems that are going to make you hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in your sleep. For every site advertising a legitimate business opportunity there must be a thousand sites run by people that are advertising pyramid schemes or just collecting email addresses and spamming the hell out of inboxes with affiliate links. So how do you tell the difference between the good and bad? Here are a few fun rules of thumb for safely navigating the web on your journey to Internet riches:

Scammers Love Sports Car Photo Ops

It amazes me how often I find websites trying to sell steaming piles of B.S. with a picture of a guy standing next to an expensive sports car. What baffles me is that the pairing of a get-rich-quick message with the visual of an expensive set of wheels must work a lot, because pictures of dudes hamming it up next to hot rods are everywhere! Before you go giving your email address away and opening up your inbox to sir-spam-a-lot, recognize that any loser with a point and shoot camera can get a picture of themselves standing next to a set of hot wheels.