Fraud, Scams, and Discovery of truth about odd rumors.

Hearsay, Lies, Deception. Scare tactics, identity theft, and distortion.

The internet if full of all of the above.

Motives range from profits and stealing to tarring the reputations of opponents, and mischaracterizeing the motives of competitors .

Methods used in these sort of vices are as long as the history of crime…from small "grifts", to pickpockets, from high level con-artists to large financial and security fraud.

While many portals and searchsites have some answers, posing the odd question won't do you as much good as going to a site specifically that rigorously examines AND usefully indexes past and current questions that make it easy for you to drive your way to the question and answers about the Frauds, or Scams or Cons you're curious about.

My favorite site for getting to the bottom of muck and confustion is the "Urban Legends Reference Pages" at snopes.com They provide a drivable index based upon crime to toxins, from the Titanic to Medical issues.

Sites allowing you the consumer or individual, to discover past scams and find explations of the legal and criminal motivations involved.

Snopes Urban Legend pages

Don't forget to consider Firstgov.gov either, our tax dollars at work drying to provide answers on specific questions!

Its Consumer Protection and Saftey Page has sub-feature sites on Internet Fraud, Scams and Frauds, top 10 consumer complaints, spyware, do not call registry, and more.

FirstGov.gov is the US Govenrments resource directory, which also is a great tool for finding free expert advice and data from local goverments
The US government directory site ... a FANTASTIC resource for diverse information, much of which will never be pointed out to you by commercial search engines or large "network TV" sorts of web portals.

I find it shameful that so many commercial portals hide or do not emphasize links to sources of top quality Govenrment information. (5/5/2005)

Don't trust the Gov pages as an only resource, because they might not talk as freely as you'd hope, but don't ignore the indexes of resources, including possible legal help or numbers to get the bad guys arrested that you can find on the government sites.