If you have lived long enough in the internet age, you must’ve been burned by scammers or know someone who has.

I remember one time when I paid 1BTC to an online merchant to receive an increase. Let’s just say a week later the website was off the internet and that was it.

These things happen and it will be wise for you to secure yourself.

The thing about scam online business or platforms is this, they are out to profit from your loss. This must be done regardless of how long it takes them.

Without wasting ore time, these are the Simple Ways To Detect Scam Websites

The two major ways of finding out are
1. Anonymity
2. A too good to be true offer (this needs explanation)

1. Anonymity

Most people would not go to a hospital where they don’t know the doctor or ever seen a doctor. They want to know names, some even go as far as asking when did you finish, where did you finish from. Most people go online and ask questions.

This is because no one wants to fall in the hand of a quack. This must be our approach towards our information on the internet and our money as well.

So, when you want to know from this angle if a website or online business is legit, here are 4 things to do

• Search on Nairaland: I can’t stress this enough, that place is gold and many Nigerians are so honest about their experiences on the platform. Read comments and reviews about what you’re interested in doing.
  There are 2 things involved though, if no noise about it, then it is fairly new and requires time to prove itself. The other thing is if you see bad comments, run. Let us face the facts you, didn’t discover the online business first in Nigeria.
• Use Who is: who is is a site that allows you to know who registered a domain, where they are, when the domain was registered and other details. it is a very helpful tool I use and I trust it will help you in understanding the terrain. The site is whois.com/whois
• Check Social media: Do they have a face to the business? You know, why things go sideways, do you have a face or a name to hold on to? That right there is a means to discover online platforms aiming at your hard-earned money. What is their Facebook like?
• Physical Location: This is very important. Can the location be traceable? Can you walk into their office or at least the home address? This is actually very true because you want to be able to put a face and an address to the name.

Generally, people trust businesses that have physical locations they can easily check up on google.

2. A too good to be true offer (TGTBTO)

This one deserves some explaining so you don’t mix things up. An offer of where you invest X amount of money and get x^2 in 24 hours is too good to be true.

You have heard of binomo haven’t you? That is a good example of a TGTBTO. A business where they are selling nothing but as you bring in the money others under you pay you just for paying sake no product by the side or service what is it? TGTBTO

When you see the price of a product ridiculously below the market price, there is surely something fishy about it. It is a TGTBTO RUN

Simple Ways To Detect Scam Websites

If you combine the Simple Ways To Detect Scam Websites you will be able to save yourself from a lot of stress and heartbreak in the long run.

There are so many ways to discover these scam sites, tell me what you think of the list, and if you will add anything else.

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In the previous post “Before You Say I Don’t Know” , I wrote about one of my secret weapons “Let me get back to you on that” and I must confess it really is a lifesaver. It saves your reputation and shows your client that you’re one given to research and get your facts right.

If you missed it, you can catch up right here 👉🏿 https://taddigitals.com/before-you-say-i-dont-know/ 

Or over here 👉🏿 https://bit.ly/2qdHyea

In this post, I will be discussing my second secret weapon …drum roll… 🥁🥁🥁 “Can you give me a few minutes to arrange my thoughts?” this is a question, a polite question at that. Unlike the former secret weapon where you can use it in order to get back to the person at a much later time.

Just to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking for time to think things through in a negotiation. No shame, no feeling of not enough, nothing. All you need is time to think and get your facts straight.

How To Use Weapon

This weapon is for quick responses. You know those moments when you would almost qualify for having a nervous break down for lack of knowledge, or those moments that can make or break a business deal and you just need to make one last Google Search or one last phone call.

It could be that you need to remember a particular cost or detail. Rather than making the mistake of messing things up with a wrong quotation or detail, you can throw in the “Can you give me a few minutes to arrange my thoughts?” line.

It’s a perfect fit, it gives your client the power to say yes or no. Shows them that you need their go-ahead which further gives them a sense of being a part of the decision making process.

If you are in a physical meeting, at this point, you pick up your phone and step out. With an online meeting, you kindly log off to get back to them.

I hear you ask “what will they do in the period I’m away”; lol they will bite their nails, drink coffee, check their twitter or Whatsapp status or whatever else people do when they’re waiting for someone with vital information.

You don’t have to hurriedly make a decision that can tie you down or cause a bad deal. Be confident enough to go through the process. This is how you can say I know.

Do you have other secret weapons or variations of these ones? Kindly let me know in the comments section.

I love to read your comments.

As a young professional, a business owner or creative into freelancing, you get a lot of people asking you questions.

“Do you know blah blah blah”, “what is so and so” “when does so do so” and most times, a lot of people sell themselves short by immediately offering a response. And more often than not you hear the “I don’t know” line.

Being in the business of relating with people selling al sorts, ranging from mobile phones (UK used) as at 2009 to making shirts, to selling books, to selling spiral bind materials, to selling catfish, to selling Irish potato, organizing choirs and concerts, to scoring music, to training people in music, to database management, to more recently, digital marketing, web development, running e-commerce stores etc, I have come across several if not hundreds of “Do you know” questions, and I have made a mistake with answering too soon to some of them.

I have learned my lessons and maybe you can also.

Watch this;

The world thrives on knowledge, people say money makes the world go round, I think knowledge makes money go round.

Think about it for a moment, look at the market place, the big companies you know, the brands you buy, there is something they seem to know that makes you patronize them.

It’s in the knowledge.

When people come at you with the “Do you know” question before you say I don’t know, say either of these two things…

1. Let me get back to you on that

This is a winner every damn time. Especially when you’re on a phone call or face to face with the person you can make such a statement. A simple -Let me get back to you on that- can save you a great deal.

A little personal experience, I was on a phone call with a soon-to-be client and she asked my opinion on two platforms for email marketing, to be honest, I was hearing the second name for the first time. I immediately threw in my secret weapon “Let me get back to you on that ma”.

After the call, I did a simple Google search and I learned a thing and more about the platform. I got back to her and she knew I was a professional because I did extensive pros and cons of both.

You can have such an effect on your clients and even colleagues. Before you say I don’t know, say “Let me get back to you on that”

I will share the second in subsequent posts…

Kindly let me know if this was of help to you.

In 8 steps, over the next few paragraphs and images, I will show you just how to set up official mail on android phone.

Before we begin, here is a checklist of things that you will need to achieve this task.

1. An official email e.g info@taddigitals.com
2. An android phone
3. The official Gmail mobile app. You can get that on Google Play Store
4. Internet
5. Last but not least, a strong will to get your official mails on your mobile device.

Step 1: 

Go to your Gmail settings and select add a new account. It should bring you to this page here. You should select other. Why are you selecting “other”? There’s an explanation but let’s just stick to the other reason for now which is that its what you should do.

Step 2:

It should bring you a page where you will impute your email, as soon as you do that, you will land on this page next. Yes go ahead and select POP3.

Step 3:

Your password will be requested, make sure to use the correct password to the email address. Click next

Step 4:

You will land on the incoming server settings, you can make a decision of what deleting messages from the phone will mean.

Step 5:

The first image is the pop up you will get when you click next. kindly select advanced.

On the next screen, scroll down and select proceed anyway.

Step 6:

When you select next on the outgoing server page, it will state that the certificate is not valid. Unlike the Incoming server step, click back. It will then bring you to a page where you can change the security type.

On that page, select none in the security type panel.

That should do it.

Step 7:

Account options. You make the choice for yourself when you see it.

Step 8:

You should see the Your account is set up and email is on its way page by now. Yes, we have victory at last. You will have to choose the name you want to be on the sender name whenever you send an email.

The second page shows you how your email settings should look. With your new email attached to the bottom.

I hope this was helpful to you. Kindly let me know in the comments section. It will be my delight to read your feedback and comments.

Before you go, Being whatsapp and instagram ceo is all cool until whatsapp will crash once again or facebook group of apps will freeze for a few hours. Check out my blog post on how the effects on your business and to overcome the dangers.

Gracias.

Instagram and Whatsapp Down Again what it means for your Business

Even if you live on Mars you would have noticed that Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours today (04-07-2019).

Thing is, it has almost become a regular occurrence and people are getting used to it.

As a business owner, what does this mean to you?

You may not have admitted that the constant failings of the facebook group of apps are affecting your business. I am here to tell you that it is. Also, I will like to let you know that you can do your business beyond failings of WhatsApp and Instagram.

How I knew the apps were down was terrible. I was in between a conversation with a client and was about to get a payment of $200 and I could not send voice notes. Neither could I send nor receive images. Thankfully, we could also communicate on other mediums chief of which is via our official email accounts. It saved me valuable time and money most importantly.

Instagram and Whatsapp Down: Way Out

Can you imagine you run an Instagram or WhatsApp (yes people have those as well) store and you cant send your new products to your customers? And this is because WhatsApp is down? you must know by now that you need a platform that will not have the frequent failings as we see it today on these popular social media.

We offer amazing e-commerce websites at very affordable prices you can check our prices here

Also, if you run an NGO, an organization or offer services of any kind, we have got you covered. we have very affordable website design packages you can check them out here

As seen on the Independent

Last time all three of Facebook’s major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.

“As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services,”. Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed. “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.”

When those problems happened in March, they were said to be perhaps the biggest outage in the history of the internet. It hit millions of people.

“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector, told Techcrunch in the wake of that outage. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large scale outage.”

The temperature has shot up 20 degrees since the day before and is 20 degrees hotter than it will be the day after, too. With his twin brother, Tyler, and a small entourage in tow, the 6-foot-5 Cameron abruptly stands up from a proportionately giant boardroom table at the swanky New York offices of Gemini, the brothers’ cryptocurrency exchange, and makes for the glass door in the glass wall that encloses the immaculately shiny room.

During a brisk two-minute walk through the hip Gramercy Park neighborhood, Cameron passes two gyms before entering a Starbucks on the corner of Park Avenue South and 23rd Street, in the same building as the IMG modeling agency that represents Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot and the SPIN Ping-Pong lounge owned by actress Susan Sarandon.

Moving quickly past the chilled glass case holding cookie dough cake pops dipped in melted milk chocolate and doughnut cake pops in strawberry frosting topped with giant rainbow sprinkles, he approaches a counter where an infrared Honeywell scanner sits sandwiched between bunches of ripe bananas and Starbucks-branded sugar-free chewing gum.

As the song “Work” by Rhianna blares through the coffee shop’s speakers, Cameron orders the small cold-brew coffee he’d been craving and takes out his phone. He brings up the beta version of a new app called Spedn, built by little-known payments startup Flexa and waives a QR code in front of the Honeywell scanner, paying for the drink with a cryptocurrency he and his brother invented that’s powered by the ethereum blockchain.

In some corners of the world, what has just happened would be considered historic. He turns around like a proud father and smiles. “We’re finally realizing the promise of crypto in payments,” says Cameron. “It’s taken a long time, but as you’ve seen for yourself, we’re here. It’s a total win for the merchants. That transaction was effectively free.”

The problem is, Starbucks, along with every single one of a huge group of giant enterprises now accepting cryptocurrency as payment, seems to be having trouble admitting what they’re doing. As a photograph of the receipt for the transaction was taken, one member of the Winklevoss entourage recommended that Cameron cover up the Starbucks logo with his thumb. “They’re not participating in the first announcement,” she reminded Cameron.

In the days that followed, neither Gemini, which is custodying the cryptocurrency, nor Flexa, the company that built the app and signed up the enterprises participating in today’s launch, were able to get any of their own clients to confirm via email, yet alone talk on the record. Nevertheless, all evidence points to the fact that as of today, some of the largest and best-known companies in the world are now accepting bitcoin, ether, litecoin, bitcoin cash, zcash and the Gemini Dollar (GUSD), a cryptocurrency backed by real U.S. dollars stored in a State Street account and built on top of the public ethereum blockchain.

Receipts provided to Forbes from a few of the hundreds of beta app testers confirmed that crypto purchases were made at Game Stop, Bed Bath & Beyond and Whole Foods. Emails from Barnes & Noble, Office Depot and Nordstrom were also provided by Flexa to confirm the stores’ participation in the project. In total, 89% of the beta users spent cryptocurrency at at least one of the locations announced today, according to Flexa data, with 81% of those spending multiple times at more than one location.

Companies now officially accepting these cryptocurrencies, according to Flexa, are Barnes & Noble, Baskin Robbins, Bed Bath & Beyond, Caribou Coffee, Crate & Barrel, Express, GameStop, Jamba Juice, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot & OfficeMax, Petco, Regal Cinemas, Ulta Beauty and Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market. And of course, there’s Starbucks, in spite of not being part of the official launch. In total, nearly 100 stores are expected to start accepting bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies via the Spedn app by the end of this year.

“The crypto industry has historically overpromised and underdelivered,” says Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss, 37. “And this is one of the first times we’re actually delivering on the spend use case of using your crypto.”

To be perfectly clear, this is a big, big deal. For an industry born in anonymity and mystery, grown by crypto-anarchists, and tested in the fires of black markets in the dark corners of the deep Web, this is the beginning of a new phase of mainstream acceptance. But also to be clear, none of the companies have independently confirmed they are accepting cryptocurrency.

In spite of Cameron’s purchase, Starbucks, the only company that responded to our requests, claimed they are not working with Gemini or Flexa. One possible reason is that in August 2018, Starbucks announced it was a founding partner of a competing cryptocurrency exchange, Bakkt, and would help the New York Stock Exchange spin-off convert digital assets into U.S. dollars for acceptance as payment at their stores.

So how is Flexa already letting Cameron Winklevoss pay for that Starbucks coffee with crypto, and how are the 15 other enterprises also doing so? First, users need to download the app from Apple’s App store, then send it their asset of choice from any cryptocurrency wallet. While Gemini custodies the crypto funds, Spedn takes care of the payment itself by generating a one-time QR code on the phone’s screen, which is scanned by the participating store’s existing scanner, debiting the amount charged from the customer’s account. While the customer gets a receipt showing the purchase as a gift card, Spedn settles the payment with the merchant in the preferred currency at a later date.

There are two main reasons why these merchants might want to use a product like Flexa, according to its CEO, Tyler Spalding, or competitors such as BitPay, Coinbase, or Circle Pay, the last two of which also have their own stable coin, called USD Coin (USDC). The first is that because cryptocurrency transactions are permanent, they give Spedn the certainty it needs to decline requests that funds be returned, a process called chargebacks. Consulting firm Javelin Strategy estimates that chargebacks cost merchants $31 billion in 2017. “We have a verified, irreversible payment,” says Spalding, 39. “Which is not possible using any other current method.”

Spalding, a former NASA researcher and a director at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, says the second benefit to merchants is that it only costs his company about four cents to “process any payment of any size.” With average interchange fees in 2017 ranging between $0.22 and $0.52 depending on the transaction value and the percent fee, according to U.S. Federal Reserve bank data, there’s plenty of room to negotiate and still turn a profit. For larger transactions, the profit for Flexa could be massive, and so could the savings for merchants. “Whatever they’re paying now, we want to go lower than that,” says Spalding. To give an idea of what’s at stake, $5.93 trillion in traditional credit card payments resulted in $88.39 billion in fees in the U.S. alone, according to a 2017 Nilson report.

Spalding was first inspired to bitcoin payments as a result of Game Seven of the 2016 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and his beloved Chicago Cubs. It had been 106 years since the Cubs had won a World Series, and as 40 million viewers tuned in to watch the game on television, tickets to the game were selling for as much as $50,000 a pair, with worries over fraud rampant. A lifelong Cubs fan who grew up in Chicago, Spalding and his wife flew, to Cleveland to watch the season-clinching historic game.

At the time, Spalding was the chief technical officer of gift card startup Raise, and was already familiar with alternative means of payment. So when he found a season ticket holder willing to sell him two tickets for $10,000 worth of bitcoin, he wasn’t surprised, and jumped at the chance. “This was a very high-value, very risky transaction, and this person is saying, ‘No. No. I want crypto,’” says Spalding. “It was perfect.” A Chicago Cubs victory and two years later, he co-founded Flexa.

Tyler Spalding of Flexa
Flexa cofounder Tyler Spalding with his wife at Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, which they paid to see with bitcoin. TYLER SPALDING
Spedn is the first app powered by the Flexa Network, an ethereum-based payments network similar to Visa or Mastercard, but for spending cryptocurrency. To build on the network, Spedn and others are required to lock up its native flexacoin cryptocurrency as collateral. “The apps need to pledge within the network to allow their apps to spend,” says Spalding.

In addition to giving builders access to the network, the token was sold to Pantera Capital and others to raise $14.1 million in a private initial coin offering (ICO) to pay for development and compensate the founders, among other uses. About 15% of the total coins in existence were sold during an ICO, which valued the company at about $80 million at the time. Over the week before today’s announcement, the price of a flexacoin actually dropped 30% to $0.0053, according to price site CoinGecko, but over the past 30 days it increased 108%.

While today’s crop of giant, well-known companies accepting the Spedn app is certainly the largest, highest-profile group to ever accept cryptocurrency, they are not the first. In fact, this is really the latest in a second wave of companies to do so. Early in the history of bitcoin a number of high-profile companies including CheapAir, Microsoft, Overstock.com, Reddit, and Expedia started accepting cryptocurrency. Venture-backed OpenBazaar is an online market that lets its vendors accept a wide-range of cryptocurrencies as payment for goods.

But in 2018, as the price of bitcoin collapsed from $19,000 to $5,000 Expedia, Reddit and a flurry of other companies stopped accepting the cryptocurrency, citing lack of interest due to price volatility. The mantra of the time was “hodl,” a misspelling of the word “hold,” meaning not to sell or spend cryptocurrency. The app’s name, Spedn, derived from “spend,” is a play on this mantra.

One big difference between the first generation of companies accepting cryptocurrency and those announced today is the relatively recent invention of stable coins like the Gemini Dollar and USD Coin, which give users the benefits of crypto without the risk of fluctuating prices. “Our dream one day is to allow any coin to be spent at any merchant,” says Flexa cofounder Trevor Filter, 29. “Not just in the U.S. but across the entire world.”

Culled from here