In my almost daily quest for freelance writing jobs, I often come across suspicious looking posts. Later down the road, I’ll learn the ads were scams, usually because a freelance writer posts on a forum or blog about having been ripped off.

Often, the writing scams are for content writing jobs — usually the ones that offer a few bucks per article. I can often spot the ones that aren’t legitimate, because even their ads aren’t genuine — they’re usually plagiarized, often rip-offs of a previous poster’s ad for content writers. My feeling about those types of writing rip-offs is that if you’re foolish enough to offer your freelance writing services for $3 per article, you’re asking for it.

Then, there are the ads (usually on craigslist) for screenwriters or collaborators, or ads written by people claiming to be publishers or agents soliciting material from new writers — usually for a fee. Once again, if you’re foolish enough to believe that publishers and agents spend their time trolling sites like craigslist looking for submissions, you’re probably in for a good lesson learned the hard way.

But then, there are the more clever deceits. For example, while browsing Deb’s Freelance Writing Jobs blog, I noticed a craigslist ad posted by a publication calling themselves Life Gardens — their ad is here, although I suspect it will be flagged/removed soon. They claim to be paying $50-$200 for personal stories. Because I’ve been published by Common Ties, a legitimate site publishing personal stories, I immediately recognized the text of the Life Gardens ad as almost identical to the one Common Ties frequently posts on craigslist. To me this means that even if Life Gardens is legitimately purchasing stories, they are already plagiarists, so God knows what will be done with any submissions they receive. (My guess is they won’t pay at all — but that’s just my unconfirmed suspicion.) What’s unfortunate about this type of thing is that many new writers will probably submit to them and get screwed over. If I hadn’t been familiar with Common Ties and hadn’t recognized the Life Gardens ad as plagiarism, I might have submitted to them myself.

The lesson here: Always do some research on a publication, before you submit, in order to help protect yourself from getting scammed. Although a lot of times a gut feeling will be enough to go on, good scam artists do a better job of seeming legitimate. A simple Google search can often confirm a suspicion. If Google doesn’t turn up enough results to go on, that lack of feedback in itself might be a good sign to pass.