Before engaging a business or person online to perform some task for you, such as website design or marketing, perform some basic checks to ensure they can be trusted. The internet is more suited to scams and rippoffs than the offline world, and there are many scam websites and seemingly legitimate people who turn out to be criminals. Before signing anything, a number of simple steps should be followed to ensure you are dealing with a professional and trustworthy organisation. Firstly you should ask for customer references or samples of previous work. You could even contact those who wrote the references to see if they are genuine. Secondly you can search the search engines and look for positive or negative comments. Thirdly the professional approach is to check up on a person online using a reverse number lookup site which can supply huge amounts of background info about most people.