1  Remember the Golden rule - If it sounds too good to be true it’s probably a lie!

2  Always get a prospectus or product disclosure statement (PDS) - Read your prospectus carefully.

3 Deal only with licensed advisory businesses - Do a free safety check of ASIC’s databases

4  Learn to love your paperwork - It’s the paperwork that protects you

5 Don’t get involved in anything illegal - If you lose your money you’ll be too frightened or embarrassed to complain

6 Check tax claims made by scheme promoters - Check with the ATO before you invest your money

Money transfer schemes are typically promoted by email and on the internet as ‘working from home’ opportunities.The schemes claim to offer you a commission simply for receiving money into your bank account and then transferring it out again. The commission can range from between 7% to 15% of the amount transferred.

Warning

This high rate of commission should immediately ring warning bells. Why would anyone want to pay you so much to transfer money out of the country when they could do it themselves? Sometimes, the schemes claim that they’re just getting round supposedly tough tax laws in their home country. These claims are false.

The Australian Bankers Association, the industry association for our banks, has warned that the funds being transferred: ‘are often the proceeds of fraud and persons who act as “agents” in schemes like this are effectively laundering the proceeds of crime committed against their fellow consumers.’

An anti fraud expert in the banking sector has told ASIC: ‘The purpose of these emails and websites is for innocent (and in some cases not so innocent) parties to provide bank accounts to receive stolen funds.

These funds are stolen from other banking customers via the internet. As you may be aware, there has been an increase in the use of trojan and keylogging viruses capturing customer internet details. Once these details are known, the offenders need Australian bank account to launder the money through. Once the money is transferred to these accounts, the account holder is instructed to keep a commission and pass the rest to a pre-arranged overseas destination.’

Spam is the Internet equivalent of junk mail in your letter box.

Spam emails are commercial electronic messages that have been sent to you without your consent. Senders often attempt to buy, sell or advertise goods, services, land, investment opportunities and so on through spam. Spam not only clogs up your inbox with annoying, unwanted messages, but also creates a time cost to you in deleting them, and if the problem is particularly bad, there are increased download costs. As well, spam can often contain viruses, worms and trojans.

Software is available to help reduce the inflow of spam. It detects unsolicited and unwanted emails and prevents them from reaching your inbox by searching for suspicious word patterns or other clues that may indicate spam. The filtering software then diverts these messages to (in some cases) a special mail box or location so that you can check through them later and delete those that are spam.

It is not possible to completely stop spam from entering your email box, however, it is possible to take steps to prevent a large amount of spam

• Explore options for dealing with spam with your Internet service provider.
• Install a spam filters to stop spam emails getting to your inbox.
• When you receive spam, add the address to ‘junk senders’ - most mail programs have the ability to block senders, or add them to a ‘junk senders’ list.
• Do not respond to unsolicited mail.
• If the source of an email appears dubious, do not use the ‘remove’ or ‘unsubscribe’ link.
• Do not open attachments in messages if the source of the message is unknown or is suspicious.