Over the past couple of weeks I have been indirectly exposed to circumstances of commercial fraud. In both instances, I am happy to say that I am not in any way involved; however, I do know people who are involved in these frauds, and they are enduring significant headaches as a result.
After the fact, all it took on my part to learn about the characters and companies involved in the two situations was to do a simple Google search. Once I searched the names of the companies and their representatives, it was very apparent that there were problems (or certainly potential problems). Had the simple web search been done before the actual involvement, a lot of grief would have been avoided.
As we all know, you cannot always trust everything you read on the web. However, before you start doing business with any person or company, it would be wise to do a quick web search to see if there is information that will cause you to ask more questions before you get involved. Doing this easy search can help you to avoid a lot of very big headaches and to save a lot of big-money down the line.
