Bill Myers - August 27, 2010

If you do a Google search for the name of any product you've created, you are likely to find places where it appears you can download your product for free - without payment to you.

This should make you mad, especially if you visit these download sites and see how many times your products have been illegally downloaded.

But before you get mad, you'll want to know that most of these sites are scams - designed to steal from people who think they can steal from others.

The way the scam works is this.

Most of these 'file sharing' sites charge a small membership fee, usually less than $10. And that fee must be paid with a valid credit card.

And that's the scam.

See, the majority of these sites don't really have illegal copies of any product to download. The only goal of the site is to get the credit card numbers of people who want to join.

They then use those credit cards to make unauthorized charges, and the card holder doesn't find out until its too late.

In a recent article on my site, I reported on over 600 of these kinds of sites, many operated by organized crime, and showed how to quickly discover the scam, without risking your credit card details.

If you are a product creator, you'll want to know about these scams before you spend too much time worrying about how much money it appears you are losing to illegal downloads.

And if you are a consumer tempted by free downloads of products that should be paid for, beware - these scams are out there.

You can find out more about this in the members area of www.bmyers.com