An initial step you will want to take when presented with a potentially interesting investment opportunity over the Internet involves getting the facts about any company or investment plan you might be considering from an independent source.

Furthermore, do not base your investment decisions solely on what you read on any particular online website, newsletter, e-mail or discussion forum. This is especially important if the information pertains to a stock that is thinly-traded and from an obscure company or to an overseas investment.

Categories of Internet Investment Fraud

While Internet investment fraud has many different variations, most of them fall into one or more of the following basic categories:

• Pump and Dump or Short and Distort Stock Scams
• Pyramid Schemes
• Low Risk, High Reward Frauds, HYIP and Ponzi Schemes
• Overseas Investment Frauds
• Over-hyped forex software

A good idea if you want to protect yourself from these scams would involve reading up on each of them in order to familiarize yourself with the ways that they are perpetrated and how to avoid becoming just another victim of investment fraud.

How Online Investment Frauds Spread

The ways that investment frauds are now perpetrated over the Internet are often similar to how such frauds were committed in the past using telephone calls or solicitation letters sent via snail mail.

A variety of Internet-based means can be used to find and entice potential fraud victims. These might include:

• Online newsletters
• Unsolicited spam e-mails
• Discussion forums
• User groups
• Bulletin boards
• Article websites
• Chat services
• Websites

Remember, it usually does not take that much to use these techniques or to set up a fancy website these days, so do not be taken in by what you read online. Check out any investment advice thoroughly before committing any funds to help prevent Internet investment fraud.

Steering Clear of Stock-Related Frauds

One classic stock-related fraud is known as the boiler room scam. This generally involves a broker placing excessive pressure on clients to trade over the telephone, but this sort of pressure can also be found in communications made over the Internet, especially in chat rooms or e-mail. Boiler rooms are often used in microcap stock frauds that involve the high-pressure sale of distressed, non-existent or overvalued stock.

Accordingly, when it comes to preventing stock frauds, investors will generally want to look for those that have filed registration statements and periodic reports with the SEC. You can review these documents for the company by going to the SEC’s website and searching the SEC’s online and public EDGAR database for free.

Furthermore, you will want to avoid buying the stock of any company that is not listed with the SEC without thoroughly checking the validity of each any every material statement made about the company.

Basically, investing in unlisted stocks is really only for expert investors who will want to perform their due diligence by taking verification steps like the following:

• Obtaining and analyzing financial statements from the company.
• Verifying any important new product developments or contract claims.
• Calling the company’s suppliers and customers to find out if they do indeed have dealings with the company.
• Researching the background of the company officers to see if they have a criminal record or have given investors a good return in the past.

We invite any previous or current Wesabe users to try CalendarBudget as a replacement, a fresh and innovative way to manage your finances. CalendarBudget is a growing service and we are confident that anyone who tries it will fall in love with its simple to use and productive interface.

http://blogs.calendarbudget.com/

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Enjoy!

Wow! I’ve just spent an hour setting up my transactions, history, upcoming transactions, notifications, and accounts and I’ve got to say that this app is obviously build by people who actually use it. Thank you for creating Calendar Budget. I discovered it less than 24 hours ago and have already recommended it to friends and family. This is exactly the budgeting tool I’ve been looking for all my life. In fact, I found it because I was looking at my Google calendar and the cashflow I created in Excel and was thinking there must be some way to merge the two and make it work.

The functionality is excellent…Keep up the amazing effort! Have you considered presenting at DemoCamp Toronto?

-City Dan

[My wife] is pretty skeptical about most budget software, because she’s not found something that resembles her budgeting technique, and most programs, like MS Money or Quicken, don’t quite represent the way we spend money and pay bills (though both are nice pieces of software in their own ways).

So I showed her Budget Manager, the demo, and she ‘got it’ right away. She likes to see how much will be in the bank on any one day.

- Chris Wheeler, Ontario, Canada

One other thing that I’m excited about is that finally my husband and I can be on the same page. If he needs to buy unscheduled gas or grab lunch, he can get a snap shot of our account balance and budget without checking with me first. And he can go in online and make the update himself so I’m not pecking him about a receipt. I hate him feeling like a kid on an allowance!

- Venita Davis

-Squash

My second realization was that the money I’m going to save by seeing my budget in advance and knowing when I can spend and when I can’t (had a few bounced checks lately because of miscalculations), I’m going to be saving a lot more money than CB will ever cost. I can also see that Eric is extremely interesting in making CB the most powerful and useful tool for the masses (which I am part of) and that is the cherry on the sundae for me.

There is still work to be done on this tool of life, but like a good wine, it will get better with time!

-Lucas

CalendarBudget lets you schedule payments and see how it affects your overall accounts over a period of time. It lets you assign budgets to categories and instantly get feedback on how it affects your accounts. I love the fact that you can schedule expenses and instantly know what needs to be changed to as to not go over limits. Constant upgrades, feature additions and user feedback helps in keeping the tool flexible to use in many situations. I used this tool multiple times a day and find it invaluable; looking back I’m not sure how I survived before it.

On top of great features, CalendarBudget is written by an awesome developer in terms of communication and bug fixes. I have had multiple times when I had to contact Eric and received a response almost instantly. Quick responses, great communication and Getting Things Done add a lot of value and credibility. I recommend CalendarBudget to all my friends, relatives and strangers.

-AlexB

Calendar Budget is precisely the graphical interface that I envisioned for a budget and money management application. It has a wonderful user interface that took very little time to setup and within a week of using it, I already feel that it is one of the rare gems of web applications that I cannot imagine myself without. Thank you so much for this great service!

-Boyens