<prompt> Human: A friend of mine recently pulled out a 50K HELOC to invest in a company which claims to build a revenue generating site. My friend says that she was told 15 ROI which I know is unlikely.I dont want to break any rules by linking to the site, but you can google Income Store which has a website. If this is a scam, how do they operate, and how can I clue my friend in without seeming like I am being rude?  <response>: The Income Store seems to be a trade name of a company called Todays Growth Consultants this is mentioned on the Income Store site in several places. You can find more information searching under that name, e.g.: It sounds like the revenue generating websites theyre talking about are effectively content farms, e.g. stuff like eHow where you churn out a crapton of low-effort low-quality content hoping to capture some traffic from search engines, and then sell ad space on the site to the highest bidder in this case, most likely scammypredatory advertisers, given the lack of actual value in the site being advertised on.So this doesnt seem to be a scam in the sense of advance fee fraud or an MLM. It seems more like recruiting people into the webspam business, which is ethically awful but not illegal or illegitimate. The scammy part is that the stated ROI figures are of course wildly inflated from what one would actually see in real life, and the up-front fee is of course based on these ROI assumptions. So its both unethical and a terrible investment, but perhaps not outright fraud. Still, unfortunately, your friends a sucker to be doing it, and really dumb for having taken out a loan to do so. 