Work At Home Scams

With the rising demand for work at home opportunities, we only needed to wait for the bad guys to show up and rip us off. While there are a lot of legitimate work at home opportunities available, there also are a lot of work at home scams that you need to look out for.

The digital era has made it a lot easier for the bad guys to do their scams as they can operate incognito with very little risk of getting caught. The stay at home mum in Ohio could just as easy be scammed by someone living a block away or by an Eastern European or Nigerian gang.

Most of the scamming signs are easy to recognize if you know what to look for, while others need a closer look to see how they scam you and what the scam is all about.
Here are some examples of the work at home scams used nowadays.

Perhaps the biggest scam of them all has to do with data entry. Most of these jobs have you making money by scamming other people in the same way that you yourself are or will be scammed by posting work at home ads. Most will also charge a fee so that you can buy a kit to get you started.

Ofcourse there is never any work coming your way, and by the time too many disgruntled people start complaining the scamming business closes internet shop. Only to start the same activities under a new name soon afterwards. Be sure to thoroughly research any data entry jobs. First of all Google the company name that offers you the job, if there's dirt to be found on that company it will show up in the search results.

On the other hand, if there is no company information to be found on the internet, then that's also suspicious. Are they using disposable company names just to scam people or are they legit but a newly started company without a history? If no information is available then give your chamber of commerce a call to find out what they know about that company.

It is very easy to just buy a domain name for a couple of bucks, build a simple website and use it for scamming practices. The website will trick many into trusting the scammers, as most people think, well they have a website and a contact address so they must be legit right?

Obscure businesses overcharging you for starting an online franchise business. Paying up to 10.000 Dollars for a crappy website or online store isn't uncommon. Apart from this initial investment they very often sell you expensive website maintenance contracts costing up to hundreds of dollars per month.

Still no problem I hear you say, as long as the returns are good. Yes you're absolutely right, but the products they offer you to sell are all crappy and the only ones making money out of it are the scammers selling them to you. In the worst case scenario you'll end up with a useless website an unsaleable inventory, and a load of debt. These guys are white collar crooks with a hard to resist fantastic sales story. They bleed you dry financially and leave you with nothing but your keyboard.

Much of the information you pay for is available for free. Check into the costs of setting up a website and online business on your own. It is available for a fraction of the cost, (registering a domain can cost as little as a 20 dollars for the year).

Do your own research before starting an online business, the time spent doing some research will save you a lot of money. Have a website built that you can manage yourself (a so called CMS or Content Management System), this will make you less dependent on the web developers who can charge up to 200 dollars per hour.

BB Design Studios.com for example build you a high quality CMS small business website for just 750 Dollars and a complete E-Commerce store including a website for only 1500 Dollars. This and a good product to sell is all you need to start your own at home business.

Many different types of work at home scams include you giving them your bank account number so they can pay you. NEVER agree to this. Payment can be made by check or through Paypal. If they refuse for any reason, it is a very big red flag. Once they have your bank account information they can charge your account fees and to get it to stop or be refunded can take time and cost you money while you work on getting it straightened out.

A job that may "sound" legitimate has to do with assembling products. However, you should know that IF you get any assembly work at all. That none of the products that you ever submit are ever going to meet the company's "Quality Standards."

They will keep stringing you along assembling for free for as long as they can. They also make their money on the fee you pay for the assembling kit you will need to assemble their product, this can also cost you hundreds of Dollars. It is very easy to fall for this initial investment as they promise you high returns for a few hours of simple work per day.

Just keep in mind that nowadays nearly all simple assembly work is outsourced to cheap labour countries, and you should ask yourself why would they pay me 20 dollars per hour, when the same job can be done in India for one dollar per day. If something sounds too good to be true most of the time it probably is.

This scam has been around for many years, so keep your eyes out for any work at home jobs that have to do with stuffing envelops at home. A lot of times you will see that for a "small" fee you will learn how to earn money doing this type of a job. In reality, what you will get for the money that you spend is a letter that will tell you how to place these same types of envelope stuffing ads in newspapers or magazines so that you too can make money.

Look in papers and magazines, there are several offers like this, sometimes several duplicates in the same paper due to the area being over saturated with people falling for the same scam. This scam has been around long before envelope stuffing went electronic.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of different types of scams that you will have to be on the lookout for. If you are serious about finding a legitimate work at home job, this should not cause you to give up since legitimate work at home jobs do exist. Just be alert and check for the signs of scamming.