How to Know if a Website is a Scam (Digital Course)?

Is Digital profit course a scam, real or fake? How to Know if a Website is a Scam (Digital Course)? Here are 9 tips to decide if it is genuine or fake.

As seen on: quora.com/Is-a-digital-profit-course-fake-or-a-…

9 Tips to Find if a Website is Fake or Genuine. In this video, we will take the example of a website that claims to offer a course known as Digital Profit Course.

Website in question: careertimes.org/in/00-dpc-in-74new.php?cid=6291…

and

careertimes.org/news/mom-makes-rs-300000-per-mo…

A couple of months ago, I found this question on Quora. Intrigued, I went ahead and did some site auditing and found a lot of interesting stuff that was worth sharing.

This video is a visual version of the answer I already wrote on Quora. If you want to read that instead, please do so from the link given in the show notes below.


The site you are seeing on the screen is quite famous that is being circulated online. This webpage has details for an online course called as "Digital Profit Course".

Since perception is mostly our reality, whether the site’s content is fake or real boils down to the timing, needs, motives and emotions of a user who is reading these articles.

And as a matter of fact, to really answer the question - I don’t know if the course is fake, scam or real. But I can definitely say their website is not something a professional team would create.

Following are 9 observations and proofs that this site or its intent is not a professional one:

1. It has the heading with an upfront mention of “Advertorial” - meaning it’s an advertisement in the form of an editorial.

2. Well, no harm in that. But let’s go further. Go ahead and mouseover on all the menu items you see on the blue menu bar: Home, Finance, Tech……..all those and notice they are all not menu items but a single image, which when clicked, all takes to just one webpage.

3. Sharing buttons: I noticed this page was shared on social media in huge numbers. Intrigued, I wanted to click to see the share buttons myself. Alas, the entire sharing set is a single image! There are no individual ‘Like’ or ‘Tweet’ buttons there. Notice how my mouse arrow turned into a hand arrow icon, meaning the entire frame is a hyperlink. You can see the hyperlink in the footer.

4. URL: What kind of a professional marketing course company would have a URL like that? Of course, it redirects to a professionally named one like Learn Digital Marketing From Home but the base URL is made of some random characters. Why should the real name hide behind that gibberish URL?

5. Featured in the media: Go ahead and click on the YouTube video they claim to have got featured in. Wait, is there even a video??

6. Timeline: This yellow highlighted text (I didn’t highlight, it’s highlighted on the site) uses the FOMO principle (Fear of missing out). To investigate this, I opened this a week ago. Then waited and opened today to see the date updated to today's date. Not surprised, that this date shows me the current date, even if I opened it 6 months later because it is employing a fear of missing out, to mislead that it's last date to apply for the course, so we got to hurry up.

7. Comments section: It reads as ‘Showing 1–20 of 47). Well, I see 20 comments in here but fail to find the remaining 27 comments.

8. Testimonials: I went ahead and inspected the commenters images. Simply right clicked on the image in my browser and selected ‘Inspect’. You will notice that all the images are stored in a weird way. ‘Indian-new-male04.jpg’, and that series goes on. Female01, 02, ……. and male01, 02, 03 ……. for all the commenters images you see there. This is quite unusual.

9. Similarities: Scammers are kings and queens of copy and paste. Look at the other pages from careertimes.org and look at the comments given. They are all the same ones as given in the webpage discussed in the previous points. Here’s that another webpage from the same site that has almost same comments copied and pasted: careertimes.org/news/mom-makes-rs-300000-per-mo…

That being said, here is a disclaimer. This entire effort of course creation could be real and the course could indeed be genuine, but what’s bothering me is why would anyone create a site that is so unprofessional and yet offer a professional course. I wouldn’t open my wallet to such a person.

However, in the future, if they advertise themselves professionally, and there are good and real testimonials to vouch that, may be I would pay them for what they have to offer.

Hope this helped you! Until next video, this is Arun signing off from Tech Library TV. Take care!

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