Cooking The Books

Each week the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking The Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's how to protect yourself from the scammers. Hosted by Frances Cook.When you're trying to make a buck, the lure of finding the golden ticket is hard to resist.The old saying 'if it's too good to be true, it probably is', gets bandied around a lot, and yet people still fall for scams over and over again.Even worse is when you think you know what you're doing. There's nothing more dangerous than a little bit of knowledge.It's often just enough to overinflate your confidence, and send you running headlong into deals that have major red flags.Take cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.They're the hot thing right now, helped along by some astonishing rises in value. They're true disrupters, likely to change the way people do business, and there is certainly money to be made.But unless you really know what you're doing, in my view cryptocurrencies are too similar to gambling at this point in time. A new