Jon Leibowitz’s comments are extremely interesting to me. For the longest time now, I’ve been thinking the whole advance fee thing, state approved agreement or not, is a bad idea. As a consumer, I wouldn’t fork over thousands of dollars and just hope someone does something with it. That’s a huge leap of faith.

Yeah, I’m biased, because the company I work for has a “No Advance Fee” policy, but isn’t that a good bias to have? Seems like, if given the choice, a consumer would always choose to get some sort of real evidence of progress before paying anyone.

You know, “show me what you’ve done and I’ll give you money.” That just makes more sense and I imagine 100% of fraud cases involve advance fees. I doubt there’s too many thieves out there doing a bunch of work, collecting money, and running away. What would they be running away from? Repeat business?