I have read a lot of articles on "due diligence" in regards to joining programs and on recognizing scams and questionable opportunities that are likely not going to earn you any money unless you are on the top of the pyramid.

I have a pretty good idea what type of programs to avoid. However making a decision to whether or not ban a program on my traffic exchange surf-bar-traffic that I want to keep free from scams as much as possible, is more difficult. I do not want to ban them on my personal sentiments of not liking them. But it is often hard to find good info especially on new programs and pre-launches.

To do a proper investigation you need to know the name of the owner of a domain. However many whois info is protected. Not always by choice by a company because with many providers it is included in the package.

What I try to do also is looking for program+scam in search engines. I found out that scam artists are now using the fact that more people start doing some research before joining something.

They are posting in forums and blogs with the above head line. Of course they say it is not a scam and a must join. They often have a domain similar as the program in question so if a program is new it pretty much pops up on top of the search results.

There are also affiliates that use this tactic.

I am glad I have experienced friends who I can ask for advice. An other wonderful resource is Dr. Dons E-book "Internet User Guide". It is packed with tips, tutorials and resources on doing research and preforming 'due dilligence".